Merab Dvalishvili’s fight week in Abu Dhabi now includes an injury report, sort of. Episode 2 of UFC 333 Embedded, published Tuesday, shows the former bantamweight champion spotting a horse and walking over to pet it while giving a tour of his new house. The horse returned the affection with its teeth. Dvalishvili was unbothered.
“Horse is my favorite animal, I love horses and I think they love me too...” he said in the clip, which Championship Rounds posted on X. Then, after the bite: “Ouch, he bite me little bit. I know I’m delicious.”
No sign it was anything worse than a pinch, and he kept right on smiling, which tracks with the version of Dvalishvili we’ve seen all week. MMA Weekly’s rundown of the episode also has Alexander Volkanovski arriving in the UAE, Movsar Evloev eating breakfast with his team, and Petr Yan doing the least whimsical thing possible, which is training at the gym.
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The stakes Saturday are real. Yan defends the bantamweight title against Dvalishvili in the co-main event of UFC 333 at Etihad Arena on Oct. 24, beneath Volkanovski’s featherweight title defense against the undefeated Evloev. Dvalishvili dominated the first meeting at UFC Las Vegas in March 2023. Yan flipped it at UFC 323 in December to become a two-time champion, which ended Dvalishvili’s 14-fight win streak after he’d defended the belt four times in 2025. Yan has won four straight since that first loss to Dvalishvili.
The calm demeanor is apparently deliberate. Yan spent the pre-fight press conference interrupting and needling him, and Dvalishvili didn’t bite back (unlike the horse). He told MMA Fighting the trash talk no longer bothers him and that he plans to answer Yan’s questions in the cage. He also called this the biggest fight of his career.
The wild card is Yan’s back. He had lumbar surgery in January, a nine-hour procedure, and Sean O’Malley said on his YouTube channel that he thinks Yan may be rushing back. O’Malley pointed to his own regret of fighting Dvalishvili seven months after labrum surgery. MMA Fighting noted there are no specifics on what the surgery was for, so nobody outside Yan’s camp knows the real recovery timeline.
My take: a horse bite on a hand is a funny clip, and a surgically repaired lower back against the most relentless takedown volume in the division is a fight-deciding question. If Yan’s lumbar spine holds up through Dvalishvili’s chain wrestling, he’s the better pure fighter and he showed it in December. I don’t think it holds up for long enough. Dvalishvili by decision, and he’ll probably celebrate by going to go pet another horse.
