Alexander Volkanovski has a UFC 333 fight to win first, but he’s already sketching out a farewell. In a run of interviews this week, the former featherweight champ talked about pulling back on training as he ages, floated a lightweight title superfight against Justin Gaethje, and sat down with Esquire Middle East to cover his upcoming bout, what Esquire’s headline bluntly called “d*-bag fighters,” and his cooking channel on YouTube.
The Gaethje pitch is the one that’ll get people talking. Speaking on the WhoTheFook podcast, as clipped by Championship Rounds on X, Volkanovski laid it out plainly: “Let’s do a superfight, lightweight title on the line and then we can both [retire]. Then, straight after that, let the division sort themselves out. Let’s make that happen.” In short, he wants one big fight for the belt and then both men walk away, leaving the 155-pound contenders to sort out the vacancy among themselves.
Training at a lower dial
The more revealing comments came in a separate clip posted by Dovy on X, where Volkanovski explained how his camp has changed. The hard sparring stays, he said, but the volume around it doesn’t. “I’m still doing them same fight simulators and very, very hard sessions. The intensity’s there, but we have to pull back a little bit. I can’t do what I was doing 5, 6 years ago,” he said. He added that he probably could still do it, but that it would be more detrimental than helpful.
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His benchmark is simple. As long as the output and intensity show up in what he called the shark tanks and fight simulators, he considers the camp on track.
The Esquire Middle East sit-down covered his UFC 333 preparation along with his opinions on certain personalities in the fighter ranks, and it gave time to the culinary YouTube series that has become a side gig for him. UFC 333 also has Petr Yan and Merab Dvalishvili in camp, both featured in prep footage MMA Fighting highlighted this week. That same roundup pointed readers to a clip of Volkanovski cracking a couple of jokes, and he was in a playful mood on X too, answering a Sportsbet post that crowned him a movie star with a row of laughing emojis.
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Quick take
The training admission is the most useful thing he said all week, and I mean that as a compliment. A lot of veterans keep grinding through the same volume until a knee or a gas tank fails in the third round, and then everyone acts surprised. Volkanovski is protecting the part of camp that matters, the live rounds that copy fight pace, and cutting the junk miles that only make a 30-something body slower. That’s a fighter adjusting before the fight forces the adjustment on him.
The Gaethje idea is fun, and moving up removes any featherweight cut from the conversation, which I’m always in favor of. Still, he’s booking a retirement fight while he has a UFC 333 opponent standing in front of him, and that’s the kind of planning that tends to go wrong. Win at UFC 333, then make the call.
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