Fast facts
- Division: Flyweight (No. 7 in the UFC Meta Rankings)
- Record: 3-0 in the UFC, riding a 12-fight win streak
- Nationality: Uzbek
- Team/gym: Not listed in available records
- Notable wins: Steve Erceg (KO, Round 1), C.J. Vergara (TKO, Round 1), Charles Johnson (unanimous decision)
Ramazan Temirov was nine years old in 2006 when he started training in karate and hand-to-hand combat. Twenty years later he is ranked seventh among UFC flyweights. On Saturday in Abu Dhabi he fights the man ranked directly above him, on a card stacked with champions, in a bout that one MMA Fighting writer picked as the best non-title matchup of the night.
The years between those two points are where his story lives.
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A teenager in Tyumen
Temirov turned pro in 2015, still a teenager, at Emperor Fighting Championship 10 in Tyumen, Russia. He stopped Saykhan Elmurzaev by TKO. That’s a modest place to begin, a regional show in western Siberia, and plenty of fighters who debut on cards like that never get anywhere near a UFC contract.
What I find most telling about those early years is what he did two years later. By 2017 he was already a professional MMA fighter with a record to protect, and he still went out and won the Asian Championship in hand-to-hand combat, the discipline he’d been training since childhood. Some fighters leave their first sport behind the moment the cage pays. Temirov kept competing in his.
From there he worked the long way through Gorilla Fighting Championship, the Muradov Professional League and Rizin. None of those stops come with the UFC’s spotlight, and that’s the point. He collected wins in rooms where very few people outside the sport were watching.
Arrival
The UFC finally called, and Temirov debuted on Oct. 12, 2024, at UFC Fight Night 244 against C.J. Vergara. He finished him in the first round by TKO and took home a Performance of the Night bonus. For a flyweight making his first walk to the Octagon, that’s about as loud an introduction as the job allows.
Five months later, on March 1, 2025, at UFC Fight Night 253, he beat Charles Johnson by unanimous decision. That fight gets less attention than the finishes, but I’d argue it matters as much. Johnson now sits at No. 15 in the Meta Rankings, and Temirov showed he could go the full distance against a durable, ranked-caliber opponent and still get his hand raised. Knockout artists who have never been tested over three rounds are a dime a dozen at 125 pounds. He’d answered that question early.
The year he lost
Then came the booking that should have made him. Temirov was scheduled to face Asu Almabayev on July 26, 2025, at UFC on ABC 9. He never made it to fight night.
In early July he’d been dealing with a festering leg infection, and the treatment involved a prohibited substance. He failed a drug test and pulled out, and Jose Ochoa stepped in to take the fight. It later came out that the substance was trimetazidine. Combat Sports Anti-Doping suspended him for one year, retroactive to July 5, 2025.
Both things can sit side by side: there’s a medical explanation on the record, and there’s a suspension on the record. The sport tends to remember the second part longer than the first. Almabayev, the man he was supposed to fight, is now ranked No. 5.
Jed Meshew of MMA Fighting put the consequence plainly in a UFC 333 roundtable this week. “Under normal circumstances, Temirov would have significantly more hype, but because he also got popped for a failed drug test, the public isn’t all in on him yet,” he wrote.
That’s fair. It’s also a heavy thing to carry for a fighter who hasn’t lost in 12 straight bouts.
The comeback
Temirov came back on July 25, 2026, at UFC Fight Night 282 against Steve Erceg, a former UFC flyweight title challenger. A year away is a long time in a division this crowded, and a returning fighter could be forgiven for wanting to shake off rust against someone softer. He got a man who had fought for the belt instead.
He knocked Erceg out in the first round. It earned him his second Performance of the Night in three UFC fights, and Meshew called it a “nasty knockout.” As of that night he was No. 7 in the Meta Rankings, and the Oct. 13 update kept him there.
Look at the shape of his UFC run so far. Three fights, two first-round stoppages, two bonuses, one clean decision. The karate and hand-to-hand combat base he started building at nine shows up where it counts, in the results, and he has finished the fights he was supposed to finish while handling the one that went long.
What’s next
The flyweight top 10 is brutally tight right now. Joshua Van holds the belt. Manel Kape, Alexandre Pantoja, Brandon Royval, Tatsuro Taira and Almabayev occupy spots one through five. Lone’er Kavanagh sits at No. 6, and Temirov is right behind him.
They meet on Oct. 24 at UFC 333 in Abu Dhabi, on a 14-bout card headlined by Alexander Volkanovski defending the featherweight title against Movsar Evloev, with Petr Yan and Merab Dvalishvili completing their trilogy for the bantamweight belt in the co-main. Kavanagh vs. Temirov is listed third, right underneath them.
Kavanagh is 27 and has had a strange year. He beat Brandon Moreno in February and looked ready to make a real title run, then Royval handled him badly in July. Meshew wrote that Kavanagh is plainly gifted but hard to predict from one night to the next, and he saw this fight as a chance for both men to show they belong in the title picture of a flyweight division that has suddenly caught fire.
I see it a little differently for Temirov. Kavanagh needs to prove the Royval loss was a blip. Temirov needs something harder to win back, which is people’s trust, and the only way a fighter in his position earns it is the slow way, by passing every test in front of the people who doubt him. He has been doing it the slow way since Tyumen.
This week the UFC’s official account posted fight week footage of him in Abu Dhabi with a simple caption: “Feeling good on #UFC333 Fight Week 😎.” The card goes live at 2 p.m. ET on Paramount+. Beat the man ranked one spot ahead of him, and that 12-fight streak becomes 13, with a top-five name likely next.
