Eugene Bareman paid Alexander Volkanovski the biggest compliment available in this sport this week. The backhanded part is the bit I believe most.
Speaking to She Loves The Gloves ahead of Saturday’s UFC 333 main event, where Volkanovski defends the featherweight title against undefeated Movsar Evloev, the City Kickboxing head coach called his fighter “our generation’s version of ‘GSP.’” Coaches say nice things about their guys the same way sportsbooks say they’re happy to take your action, so I’d normally file that and move on. What stopped me was the setup. Before he ever got to St-Pierre, Bareman went out of his way to say Volkanovski wouldn’t crack the top half of the most talented athletes he has worked with.
“He doesn’t even make the halfway,” Bareman said.
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That’s a head coach telling the public his champion is below-median raw material, days before a title defense. I love it. I also think it’s the strongest piece of evidence for the comparison, because a guy who built himself from spare parts had to learn every part, and that’s how you end up with the toolkit Bareman is describing.
The Toolkit Argument Holds Up
Bareman’s case for Volkanovski as St-Pierre rests on adaptability. He ran through it like a menu: fighting at range, fighting going backwards, coming forward, wrestling, defending wrestling, scrambling. Then he landed the point. “He can take the fight and turn the fight and mold the fight into wherever he needs to go to beat the opponent, which is what GSP would do,” Bareman said.
He also took a swipe at a lazy assumption people make about shorter fighters. “People make this mistake of thinking that a short guy can’t fight long, which is completely not true,” he said.
Here’s where my numbers brain agrees with him. Bareman’s definition of pound-for-pound is basically a count of options: “your ability to take the fight wherever it needs to go in accordance to whatever is happening in the fight and the opponent.” From a handicapping seat, that’s the correct way to value a fighter. A guy with one big weapon gives his opponent one problem to solve. A guy with five paths to victory makes the other corner game plan for all five, and most corners can’t. St-Pierre’s genius was that he’d pick whichever lane the other guy was worst in and park there for 25 minutes. Bareman described exactly that, with St-Pierre flipping between standup, defensive wrestling and offensive wrestling depending on the night.
Volkanovski has also lived in the pound-for-pound rankings for the better part of a decade, per MMA Fighting. You don’t stay there that long on one trick.
Where the Comparison Wobbles
Now the grumpy part, because somebody has to do it.
The stat that makes St-Pierre the gold standard is brutal in its simplicity. He went 28 fights with two losses and beat both of those opponents in rematches. Every blemish got erased by his own hand.
Volkanovski’s comeback has a different shape. He took a devastating knockout loss to Ilia Topuria, and when Topuria left featherweight, Volkanovski won the vacant title against Diego Lopes, then beat Lopes again in a rematch. Getting the belt back at 38 in a weight class built on speed is rare, and I’m not knocking it. But rebuilding a reign is one achievement and avenging the loss is another. The St-Pierre move would have been running it back with Topuria, and that door closed when Topuria walked out of the division.
Alexander K. Lee, in MMA Fighting’s Morning Report, signed off on Bareman’s take, pointing out that both men fought nearly every elite opponent of their era and climbed back from tough losses to win titles again. That’s fair. It’s the most generous version of the comparison and it’s mostly true. The Topuria asterisk is still sitting there.
Jed Meshew had the better one-liner on X: “Volk really nailing the twilight combat years.” At 38, he is.
What Saturday Actually Tests
An undefeated challenger is the cleanest test of Bareman’s thesis you could design. Evloev has never lost, so he has never been forced to find out what happens when his plan stops working. Volkanovski’s entire value, according to his own coach, is that he has a second plan, and a third.
Evloev has come a long way to get here. A clip circulating on X shows him defending an M-1 bantamweight title in the mountains of Ingushetia in his last fight before signing with the UFC. He’s also already welcoming a future fight with Arman Tsarukyan, per MMA Fighting, which is an ambitious thing to talk about the same week you’re facing a man his coach compares to St-Pierre.
Bareman closed by saying he has watched athletes Volkanovski’s age who “just can’t do what he does.” That’s the bet I’d make on the comparison, too. Not on talent, which Bareman himself says was never there, but on a 38-year-old who has spent a decade adding tools while everyone else his age was losing them.
UFC 333 is Saturday, Oct. 24. If Volkanovski beats an unbeaten challenger by changing the fight on him midstream, Bareman’s GSP line stops being a coach’s flattery and becomes a scouting report.
