Petr Yan has gone quiet in Kislovodsk. The reigning UFC bantamweight champion is running the first stage of his camp for the UFC 333 trilogy with Merab Dvalishvili at the Yug Sport Olympic training base, the same facility used by Khabib Nurmagomedov and his team, according to Essentially Sports. He’s working under head coach Kairat Nurmaganbetov with a small group of sparring partners picked for one job, which is keeping the Georgian off his hips.
Yan explained the choice in the UFC 333 countdown video. “My preparation is taking place at the Yug Sport Olympic training base in Kislovodsk,” he said. “This is a sports training base with all the infrastructure for achieving results.” He added that the strongest athletes go there to isolate themselves from distractions, and that the point of a camp is to build discipline and consistency.
Asaf Chopurov and Kurban Gadzhiev are in the room with him. Gadzhiev knows this matchup well because he was part of Yan’s preparation for the last Dvalishvili fight. The camp then moves to Dubai, where the work is expected to get harder, with heavy wrestling and hard sparring. Chopurov will travel with him, and Sharaputdin Magomedov joins there. Magomedov helped Yan get ready for Dvalishvili’s takedown pressure before.
The numbers from UFC 323
That wrestling focus makes sense once you look at their last meeting. At UFC 323, Dvalishvili went 2-for-29 on takedowns, a strange line for a man whose whole style depends on grinding opponents down on the mat. Yan landed five of his nine attempts. He also won the striking, outlanding Dvalishvili on significant strikes, breaking his nose and repeatedly kicking and punching the body. The 33-year-old already has a plan that worked. Now he has to make it work again.
The location adds some friction. Yan and people around Khabib have traded shots in public before. Last year he told Ushatayka that Umar Nurmagomedov “lost his last fight; he hasn’t had a single fight yet since,” and drew a contrast with his own path: “Neither my brother nor my sisters have given me anything.” Khabib answered on Instagram, telling his cousin that people might credit his success to family but that he would rise on his own. “The real ones will understand,” he wrote.
Dvalishvili, meanwhile, is already looking past the champion. “If I win, Song Yadong is next,” he told MMA Junkie. He pointed to Song’s knockout power and to the fact that the two have never fought.
My take: the Khabib angle is entertaining, but the names that matter here are Gadzhiev and Magomedov. A takedown defense that holds up for 29 attempts gets built by the anonymous wrestlers who spend weeks driving into your legs, and Yan has kept those same men around him. The gym hosting the camp matters much less than the fact that he brought back the partners from a camp that already beat Dvalishvili’s wrestling once.
