The tension between Paddy Pimblett and newly crowned UFC lightweight champion Ilia Topuria appears to ignite more with each encounter. The English fighter sat cageside as Topuria scored a brutal first-round knockout win over Charles Oliveira to claim the vacant UFC lightweight title in the headliner of UFC 317, and became the tenth two-division champion in UFC history.
While Topuria (17-0) celebrated with UFC gold hanging down each of his shoulders, it didn’t take long for Pimblett (23-3) to make his way inside the octagon. And it wasn’t to congratulate him or join the celebration. After all, Topuria had just claimed the throne as the lightweight kingpin in Pimblett’s territory of 155 pounds.
“Well done, lad,” Pimblett told Topuria. “That was a heavy knockout. I’ll give you that respect. But you will never knock me out.
“I’m going to submit you, you little p****,” the new champions said in response. To which Pimblett retorted, ‘I finish you, little man.”
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Paddy Pimblett vows ‘to disfigure’ Ilia Topuria
“We’ve got history,” Pimblett told ESPN+, after the altercation. “You don’t even need to sell that fight. It sells itself. Two people who genuinely dislike each other. You really don’t get that. We haven’t seen that since Khabib (Nurmagomedov) and (Conor) McGregor, right?
“Two people who actually hate each other. Because I hate him (Topuria). I wouldn’t even want to finish him fast. I’d want to finish him with a minute left in the fight. After I’ve elbowed him 700 times. I want to disfigure him.”
Pimblett is coming off a third-round TKO victory over Michael Chandler in his last outing at UFC 314 in April. “The Baddy” is 7-0 since he made his UFC debut, a first-round knockout against Luigi Vendramini in September 2021. Only two of his seven contests have gone to the judges’ scorecards since he joined the promotion.
He is currently ranked number 10 in our current UFC lightweight rankings.
The feud between Pimblett and Topuria dates back to 2021, with a series of hostile back and forth posts through social media. They even got into a scuffle at a London hotel in 2022, after Pimblett threw a bottle of hand sanitizer at Topuria’s head.
“I’m more motivated when I’m like that,” said Pimblett, of the bad blood with Topuria. “Especially the fact that everyone thinks I’ll lose. Nine out of 10 people probably think he’ll knock me out. And I love proving people wrong. It just gives me this warm fuzzy feeling inside. Just making people eat their own words.”
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