Khamzat Chimaev has been accused of "hiding" after he was involved in an altercation with UFC middleweight Paulo Costa last week.
The pair rowed at the UFC's Performance Institute in Las Vegas, where Costa is training and Chimaev was finishing camp ahead of his fight with Nate Diaz this weekend. He and Diaz will square off at the T-Mobile arena in Las Vegas as the main event of UFC 279; his first headliner under the banner.
But first he had to deal with Costa after taking issue with something the Brazilian said at a recent press conference, with footage emerging of the fracas online. Costa, an infamous trash talker in his own right, was asked about the incident by TheMacLife and accused Chimaev of being at the gym to "talk s***" before going into hiding.
"It was just me, Jake Shields [a teammate of Diaz's] and Tamara, my girlfriend. But he was not there to fight, he just wanted to talk some s***. And now he is hiding. I came here for a couple of days after that, maybe he's hiding in some cave, some hole, I don't know. I didn't see him anymore."
It was the first altercation Chimaev got into after arriving in Las Vegas, but it wasn't to be the last as just yesterday an issue between he and Kevin Holland got so violent the UFC were forced to cancel their pre-fight press conference. Promotional boss Dana White told reporters and fans gathered for the event that it couldn't go ahead after a brawl backstage in which Chimaev was involved.
“There were multiple things going on at the same time," White told press after the incident. "It wasn’t just one thing that erupted and it happened. There were multiple things going on at the same time.
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"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 s*** show. 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 didn’t have enough people for was everybody to start fighting. When everybody starts fighting and there was more than just fighting going on that security was dealing with. We weren’t prepared.”
Chimaev and Diaz's fight will still take place as planned, with weigh-ins due today for the entire card. It remains to be seen what other disciplinary action will be taken against fighters and teams involved in the incident, which left fans outraged as they were forced to leave the press conference early.
