Alexander Volkanovski had help sitting right there before UFC 333, cleared and ready, and he waved it off. Appearing live as Ariel Helwani’s final guest on Wednesday, the Australian said UFC doctors came in for a checkup ahead of his fight with Movsar Evloev and offered him something legal that would have made him feel a lot better. His manager joined the doctors in pushing him to take it. He wouldn’t budge.
“They were like, ‘We’ve got it here. You’re legally allowed. Everything’s fine,’” Volkanovski recalled. “I’ve got my manager and the doctors trying to talk me into it, and I’m like, ‘Nah, I ain’t doing it.’”
The people around him did not take it well. “Put it this way, the team weren’t happy with me,” he said, before describing a scene where everyone else was spiraling while he stayed calm. “The team’s panicking and stressing, and I’m just like, ‘Nah, we’re sweet. Don’t worry about it.’”
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The clips Helwani posted don’t say what the medication was. We do know Volkanovski wasn’t healthy that week. A fight-day clip shared by Happy Punch caught him talking about a chest infection, and he was strangely cheerful about it: “I’m sick, but the fight would be too easy if I felt too good anyway.”
On Helwani’s show he explained that mindset in more detail. He said he gets more fired up when his body is breaking down than when camp goes smoothly. “I love challenging myself. I feel like I get more pumped up for fights when I’m injured and when things are going wrong,” he said. He added that for the last few years he’s been testing how much he can push his body through, then landed a line that will make every physio in Australia wince: “I’m waiting for the day I break a leg and I’m like, ‘I reckon I could still do it with a broken leg.’”
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It worked out on Sunday. Volkanovski beat Evloev at UFC 333, and the UFC noted that the result moved him past Jose Aldo for the most title fight victories in UFC featherweight history. Evloev took the loss hard enough to change his Instagram bio to read 0-1, according to Championship Rounds.
Volkanovski is already thinking about what’s next. In a clip Championship Rounds shared Monday, he said he’d welcome a rematch with Ilia Topuria before he retires, on one condition. “If it’s gonna be for a lightweight title then yea,” he said. “To get that win back would be great. I’m a competitor and I’d love to test myself against him.”
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Here’s my read. I love this guy, and fighting a featherweight as dangerous as Evloev with a chest infection and walking out with history is the kind of grit that makes him who he is. But his team had every right to be furious. The doctors weren’t selling shortcuts. They offered something legal to help a sick athlete breathe a little easier in a cage fight, and he turned it down for the challenge. That works right up until the night it doesn’t, and if a Topuria rematch at lightweight is the dream, I’d rather see him arrive at that fight at full strength than waiting to find out how far a broken leg can carry him.
