Footage has been released of the UFC 279 backstage brawl which forced the promotion to cancel a press conference for the first time in its history.
Khamzat Chimaev and Nate Diaz were scheduled to appear at the press conference in Las Vegas on Thursday night but UFC boss Dana White announced the event was cancelled because of safety concerns. The brawl started when Chimaev confronted Kevin Holland, who is also competing on the card, and kicked him in the chest.
A separate altercation then broke out between Chimaev and members of Diaz's team, with water bottles being thrown amongst the hostility. White revealed four of the six fighters due to speak at the press conference were involved. "All hell broke loose," he said after the incident. "We stopped it, but we didn’t do a good job of not letting it happen. There were multiple things going on at the same time. It wasn’t just one thing that erupted and it happened.
"So there was security over there, there was no security over there. There was no security over there cause everybody was dealing with the other thing and once it all started erupting, it was just a complete s*** show." In the absence of security staff, White thanked former fighters turned MMA agent Tiki Ghosun for helping break up the brawl.
Chimaev and Holland's rivalry dates back to two years when Holland took offence to Chimaev mistaking him for a hotel staff member. Holland tweeted that he "didn't feel a thing" after being kicked by Chimaev. In a dramatic turn of events, Chimaev then missed weight on Friday and will now take on Holland in the cage tonight.
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Diaz will take on Tony Ferguson in the new main event while Li Jingliang, who was originally due to face Ferguson, will take on Holland's initial opponent Daniel Rodriguez. After the brawl, White insisted the promotion would not be handing out fines to anyone involved in the fracas. "This is what we do. This is the fight business. These things happen," he said.
“When you know that you have guys that don’t like each other, you make sure that they’re isolated, you have plenty of security around. You know how Nate and Khamzat are, they could have some words and we have enough people here to deal with it. What we’ll do is we look at how this happened today, why we were not able to manage this backstage better than we did, and we’ll be better next time."
