That’s pretty bold, too, but it’s par for the course when it comes to “Borz,” who made his UFC debut on July 16, 2020, with a second-round submission of John Phillips. Ten days later, he took a little over three minutes to stop Rhys McKee. And while he had long been that underground cult hero that everyone who had been through Sweden’s Allstars Training Center talked about, winning two UFC fights in less than two weeks put him on everybody’s radar.
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“Everything changed after those two fights,” he said. “When I came home, people recognized me, and you have to be ready for that. I was ready for that because I saw (teammate and UFC star) Alex (Gustafsson) and the guys who were famous in Sweden.”
Less than two months after the McKee fight, Chimaev made his Las Vegas debut and took the level of hype to new levels with a 17-second knockout of Gerald Meerschaert. Now the call was for Chimaev to fight one of the top dogs in either the welterweight or middleweight division, but then he was taken down by the only opponent who has come close to beating him: COVID-19.
“It was bad,” he said. “You can’t do your work, you can’t do what you love.”
Even when he began the road back, all it took was ten minutes in the gym to exhaust him, and he wondered if his career was over before it got a chance to thrive. Luckily, he gradually got back to a hundred percent, and when he returned last October, it was more of the same from Chimaev, who submitted Li Jingliang in a little over three minutes.
