Nate Diaz's training partner claims he "f***ed up" Olympic silver medalist Esquiva Falcao in a recent sparring session.
UFC legend Diaz, 38, is currently preparing for his boxing debut against YouTube star Jake Paul on August 5. The MMA veteran recently stopped off at a boxing gym in Los Angeles and got some rounds in with Falcao, an unbeaten professional with 30 wins who is preparing for a world title fight in Germany this weekend.
Falcao gave an interview in his native Brazilian Portuguese about the sparring session that angered Diaz and his training partner Chris Avila, who fights on the undercard of the August 5 event against UFC veteran Jeremy Stephens. Avila claims both he and Diaz got the better of Falcao when they went 12 rounds with him.
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"That guy got f***ed up,” Avila said on The MMA Hour. “We were out in L.A. and we went to a boxing gym, this guy’s like a silver medalist out of Brazil, so Nate sparred this guy and did 12 rounds. He got f***ed up. He lost every round. Afterwards, he immediately goes to the coach, ‘Oh, I’m cutting weight, that’s why I didn’t look too good.'
"You see on his [Instagram] story it’s in Portuguese so we had somebody translate and he was talking s***. The next day we went back and the coach was like, ‘Yo, he wants to spar you.' So I sparred him, and then he lost every round again, and he still said goes and talks some more s*** in Portuguese but we didn’t know until after all the sparring. Anyways, f*** that guy."
Diaz fought at 155lb and 170lb during his UFC career but Falcao predicted his opponent was much heavier than that during their sparring session. Falcao's take about how the spar went contrasts Diaz's and Avila's, as the Brazilian claimed that he starting to go easy on Diaz because he was hitting him too much.
“He is heavy now, he’s overweight," Falcao said of Diaz. "He must weigh about 220 pounds now or more. So the only big guy here at the gym is me. So I ended up having to spar him. I enjoyed doing it though. I took it down a notch and we were just boxing. We ended up going for 12 rounds, even though he was tired. He was landing shots and eating a lot of shots too. It’s bad."
