Ilia Topuria has heard the talk about his eye, and he isn’t interested in a long conversation about it. Fielding comments from fans on Instagram Live on Saturday, Topuria was asked about the swelling and possible damage around his eye after his fight with Justin Gaethje. He brushed it off with a short line that the account @DovySimuMMA clipped and posted to X: “Eyes never lie.”
Championship Rounds posted a slightly longer version of the same moment. “The eyes never lie. Look at the eyes of the best,” Topuria said. He didn’t explain the condition of the eye, didn’t mention a doctor, and didn’t give a timeline. He treated it like a dare more than a question.
The timing made it a strange little scene. Topuria was live while UFC 333 was running at Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi, and Happy Punch also clipped him reacting in real time as Petr Yan took the decision over Merab Dvalishvili in their bantamweight title trilogy. So the questions about his face came in alongside a fight he was watching as a fan, phone in hand, with a crowd of strangers typing at him.
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The concern hasn’t come out of nowhere, and the lightweight picture around him keeps moving. On Thursday, MMA Fighting’s Morning Report ran an item headlined around Jon Jones saying he thought Topuria would pass him on the all-time great list “before UFC White House loss.” Meanwhile, Gaethje’s name is all over the division’s future. Arman Tsarukyan told Ariel Helwani that the UFC said he’ll fight for the title in February or March, with Gaethje as one possible opponent and another name in play if Gaethje retires. Tsarukyan said he believes Gaethje will retire.
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Dana White, for his part, said he’s open to Alexander Volkanovski moving up to lightweight to face Gaethje. “When a guy gets to his level, there isn’t too many things we’d say ‘no’ to him about,” White said, per Championship Rounds. That’s a familiar name to Topuria. He knocked Volkanovski out to win the featherweight belt, and Volkanovski only got it back after Topuria left the division, beating Diego Lopes for the vacant title and then beating Lopes again in a rematch. Volkanovski defended that belt against the undefeated Movsar Evloev in Saturday’s UFC 333 main event.
My take: fans asking about a fighter’s eye after a war with Gaethje is reasonable, and Topuria answering with a bumper sticker is very Topuria. It’s a good line. It also tells you nothing. Swelling around the orbital after five hard rounds or a short brutal night is the kind of thing that can be cosmetic or serious, and the only people who know which are Topuria, his team and whoever looked at the scans. Until one of them says something specific, the most concrete information we have is a confident man on Instagram Live, staring into his phone camera, inviting everyone to look closer.
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