Merab Dvalishvili isn’t pretending the scale was easy this time. Ahead of his trilogy fight with Petr Yan at UFC 333, the former bantamweight champion talked about how much weight he still had to shed, and Bloody Elbow ran his assessment in four words: “It will be tough.”
Tough or not, he got there. Dvalishvili and Yan both stepped on the scale at 135 pounds on Friday, making the co-main event official. Then the refuel started. Championship Rounds, citing Dvalishvili’s own X account, reported that he was back up to 154 pounds just hours after weighing in. That’s 19 pounds in roughly five hours, which is basically a Thanksgiving speedrun.
Why does a weight cut get this much attention? Because Dvalishvili’s whole thing is volume. This is a guy with 119 successful takedowns, the most in UFC history, and he sits third all-time in total strikes landed. His style asks his gas tank to cash checks for 25 minutes. If the cut drained him even a little, Yan is the last person you want to discover it in Round 4.
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The stakes are about as high as the division gets. Yan is the current champion, his second run with the belt, and sits No. 4 in the UFC men’s pound-for-pound rankings. Dvalishvili, the first Georgian-born champion in UFC history, is No. 9 on that list. Knockout Daily’s rankings have Yan at No. 1 at 135 with a 20-5 record and Dvalishvili at No. 2 at 21-5. Dvalishvili already owns a win over Yan from the 14-fight streak that also ran through Jose Aldo, Henry Cejudo and Sean O’Malley. This is the rubber match.
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Dvalishvili, for his part, sounded like a man who’d made peace with the suffering. At their face-off earlier in fight week, he told Yan, “Talk now, enjoy. Saturday I will show you. I will eat you.” Considering he put 19 pounds back on in an afternoon, I believe him on the eating part.
The two had their final face-off Friday. They fight Saturday, October 24, in the co-main of UFC 333, under Alexander Volkanovski vs. Movsar Evloev. If Dvalishvili’s cardio shows up the way it always has, the tough cut becomes a footnote. If he fades late against a boxer like Yan, it becomes the whole story.
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