LAS VEGAS -- Ilia Topuria is the UFC's featherweight champion, with a record of 15-0.
Well, he is if you ask him. He'll become featherweight champion and improve his record to 15-0 on Saturday if he defeats the actual champion, Alexander Volkanovski, in the main event of UFC 298 at the Honda Center in Anaheim, Calif. It will be no easy task, to be sure.
Right now, he's the challenger with a 14-0 mark and a whole bunch of confidence.
Volkanovski enters the bout after a 1-2 year in 2023, but the two defeats came in lightweight title bouts against champion Islam Makhachev, sandwiched around a dominant third-round TKO of then-interim champion Yair Rodriguez. In the second of his two defeats to Makhachev, a first-round KO loss, Volkanovski accepted the bout on less than two weeks' notice when scheduled challenger Charles Oliveira was forced to pull out because of a bad cut suffered on his last day of sparring.
After the first bout, a unanimous decision that favored Makhachev, many had Volkanovski as the world's No. 1 pound-for-pound fighter. He's ranked No. 3 by both UFC and KevinIole.com heading into the title defense against Topuria.
The 27-year-old Topuria had enough pressure on him heading into a fight with one of the game's best. But when he made those changes on social media and on his Wikipedia entry, it just upped the ante.
Just days before he'll get the chance to prove himself, he's not at all concerned.
"I've worked so hard that I don't have any doubts that I will become the world champion," Topuria says, matter-of-factly. "That's my destiny. Since I started this sport, it was always part of my destiny."
He is coming into the bout off of an incredibly dominant performance. He defeated Josh Emmett in a Fight of the Night bout on ABC on June 24. He pummeled Emmett horribly and disfigured Emmett's face to the point he was barely recognizable.
Before his first loss to Makhachev, Volkanovski had reeled off 22 consecutive wins, many of them against legends in the sport. Topuria conceded Volkanovski has an edge in experience. But as good as Volkanovski is -- and you have to be plenty good, if not great, to score three wins over Max Holloway -- Topuria thinks that's Volkanovski's only advantage.
"It's not that I see holes in him," Topuria said. "I just feel I'm better than him everywhere. I'm a better striker, a better wrestler, a better grappler. I just feel that way, like I'm better everywhere."
Topuria took one UFC fight at lightweight, a March 19, 2022, KO of Jai Herbert in London, but it's been since that fight that he's really made his reputation. Topuria submitted Bryce Mitchell with an arm triangle at UFC 282 on Dec. 10, 2022, in Las Vegas, then followed that with the battering of Emmett in Charlotte, N.C., in June.
"Going up to fight Conor McGregor would be a good option because the way I see it, for both of us, that's the only fight that makes sense. He's like the old guy who was a superstar but in the last four years, he's done nothing in the sport. Sport-wise, he's lost every important fight he had. I'm going to become a UFC champion so he'll have the chance to come back and put his name out there again. In the sport, not as a superstar, you know. Do people know him? Of course they know him. But in the sport right now, he is a nobody." -- Ilia Topuria on Conor McGregor
That was enough to earn him a title shot, as he looked scary good against Emmett. Emmett showed incredible toughness, and while the fight likely should have been stopped, Emmett never gave in and so Topuria kept doling out a beating.
He stayed with the plan and didn't get frustrated that he hadn't finished Emmett, as many young fighters might tend to do. Heck, there are plenty of highly experienced fighters who would get frustrated and break from the plan when the knockout was coming.
Topuria showed what he said was his own experience but continuing to do what was working and not deviate from that in order to get a finish that would have been nice to get but was by no means necessary.
"That was part of the strategy," Topuria said of not getting frustrated. "You have to respect the power the guy had, his right hand. So I had to stay patient and wait for my moment. Basically, it was a part of the strategy."
Part of his strategy these days leading up to his title fight seems to be as outrageous as possible in order to promote the bout and get people talking. Not only has he called himself champion, but he said nobody in the division deserves a title shot if he wins, so he called out Conor McGregor.
That doesn't seem to fit with UFC CEO Dana White's strategy. White generally wants a fighter to have racked up a few defenses before he authorizes him challenging someone from another division. But Topuria let the three clear contenders have it and lobbied for McGregor anyway.
"After this fight, my name will be in everyone's mouth," Topuria said of the top featherweight contenders. "But guess what? F*ck all of them. Title defense? Title defense? To be honest, right now the division sucks. I don't see any real title challenger right now. After I beat Volkanovski's ass, look: He whipped Max Holloway's ass; he beat Yair Rodriguez, Brian Ortega. He beat everyone in the Top 5. So it doesn't make sense to fight any of them. I'll have to wait for a real challenger."
Of course, he wasn't going to leave it there, and he had his own idea of a real challenger even if that fighter has lost two in a row and three of four and hasn't competed at all since July 10, 2021.
So if he doesn't like what is there at featherweight and he beats Volkanovski, he'll either have to go down to bantamweight up to lightweight.
"Going down is going to be really hard because of my weight," he said. "Going up to fight Conor McGregor would be a good option because the way I see it, for both of us, that's the only fight that makes sense. He's like the old guy who was a superstar but in the last four years, he's done nothing in the sport. Sport-wise, he's lost every important fight he had. I'm going to become a UFC champion so he'll have the chance to come back and put his name out there again.
"In the sport, not as a superstar, you know. Do people know him? Of course they know him. But in the sport right now, he is a nobody."