Sean Strickland has admitted that the onset of his bitter rivalry with Khamzat Chimaev may have been a result of his being ‘mentally not well’.
The controversial Californian overcame not only the odds but apparently a particularly gruesome shoulder injury during fight week to defeat the unbeaten champion and win middleweight gold for a second time at UFC 328.
For months, Strickland and Chimaev shared a feud so ugly that by the end of fight week they weren’t even allowed to face off with one another at ceremonial weigh-ins. However, they touched gloves multiple times before the bell and appeared friendly after the fight.
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Sean Strickland admits Khamzat Chimaev feud ‘could have been manufactured’
After months of bitter back-and-forth that included crude verbal jabs and even a kick during their press conference, Sean Strickland and Khamzat Chimaev settled their rivalry on Saturday. After the fact, fans speculated that it may have been all for show, particularly given that they were immediately respectful.
And while Strickland does admit that in the moment he truly felt a hatred towards Chimaev, the reason for that disdain may have been the result of his own mental health and nothing to do with his rival.
“Maybe it’s just who he is as a person but when he was in the gym he was really threatening,” Strickland told the media after his victory. “He just had that threatening demeanour. And maybe that’s like the little man inside me but when he’s threatening me I’m like ‘I want to f—ing murder you, I want to kill you.’
“Maybe he didn’t take it that way, maybe it’s his Chechen sense of humor. But in the gym he was always trying to, like, punk me. I was like ‘let’s go spar’ and we would never go spar.
“So I could have manufactured the whole situation in my head to be honest. There’s times when you’re mentally not well you’ll have interactions with people and sometimes your brain thinks something else happened.
“You have to sit back and be like ‘wait wait wait’. That’s why I like training and train so much, there’ll be times where I have an interaction with somebody and my brain hallucinates the entire interaction. So there’s a chance that I just hallucinated that entire interaction with…
2026-05-10 10:37:09
