Ilia Topuria credits his brother with saving his vision, and maybe his career, by putting an end to the Justin Gaethje fight. In an interview with Fight Disciples, clips of which circulated on X Friday, Topuria was asked whether his brother’s intervention protected him. He didn’t hedge.
“100%. If he hadn’t stopped me from fighting, I probably wouldn’t have been able to fight again in my life,” Topuria said.
That’s a heavy thing for a fighter to admit, and a rare one. The usual instinct after a loss is to argue about the stoppage, to insist you had more in you. Topuria went the other way. He described the moment his brother stepped in as the reason he still has a future in the sport, and the clips don’t show him second-guessing it at all.
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The first loss
The Gaethje fight was the first defeat of Topuria’s professional career, and he has been unusually open about how it landed. In a separate interview with the Spanish outlet ABC, conducted with journalist KO Olmenero, he talked about the morning-after reality of it.
“I’ve been in the worst situation a fighter can possibly be in. I’ve experienced the worst day of my profession. What’s worse than that? Dying,” he said. He followed that with a blunt bit of self-accounting: “you either win or you lose. And I lost.”
He also described looking in the mirror and refusing to recognize the guy staring back, which is about as honest a picture of a first loss as you’ll get from someone who had never tasted one. In his first interview since the fight, he said “The fire inside me is even bigger now.”
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What’s next
Topuria already has a name in mind. Speaking to ABC, he said “I’m coming back in April. Paddy, Paddy, Paddy,” pointing squarely at Paddy Pimblett. He then floated something nobody expected from a fighter his age, suggesting the Pimblett fight could be his last.
“I’ve achieved everything, and after this fight, what else? Maybe I’ll even retire,” Topuria said.
Dana White, speaking on the Jim Rome show, confirmed the UFC is building toward a return but gave a slightly vaguer window. “He’ll come back in early 2027. We’re working on that,” White said. April fits inside “early 2027” if you squint, though nothing has been booked and no opponent has been confirmed by the promotion.
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Quick take
The person who stops a fight almost never gets thanked for it. Cornermen and family members who step in eat the criticism from fans who wanted more and sometimes from the fighter himself, and the credit, when it comes, usually arrives years later in a retirement speech. Topuria is handing it over now, a matter of weeks after the worst night of his career, and he’s attaching a specific stake to it: his eyes. That tells you how close this came. The retirement talk I’d file under a proud man still processing a loss, because fighters who are actually done don’t usually call out their next opponent’s first name three times in a row. If he and Pimblett do meet in April, his brother will be close by, and Topuria has already told everyone how much that matters.
