UFC<\/a> legend Tito Ortiz has adamantly backed the 31-year-old to end the reign of the dominant South African.<\/p>\nInterviewed by Helen Yee, the \u2018Huntington Beach Bad Boy\u2019 was confident Plessis could not hang with the elite wrestler.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cYou are going to see just how vicious Chimaev truly is. I respect the guy, he is the monster.<\/p>\n
\u201cDu Plessis is the champ, I think he is in for a rude awakening because he is going to realise his wrestling is not as good as Chimaev\u2019s truly is.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Ortiz explained why he believes the skills of Khamzat outweigh those of the 31-year-old and gave his round prediction.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what all the Russians do, they use their wrestling to set up punches, they use their punches to set up the wrestling, and then they take people down and they choke them because they are really good at it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would give it maybe 3-4 rounds, I think Chimaev overwhelms him too much.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 50-year-old had been watching the star train in the gym and believes his work with Dillashaw is proving to be a success so far.<\/p>\n
Khamzat Chimaev\u2019s incredible UFC stat could be tested by Dricus Du Plessis\u2019 grappling<\/p>\n
An interesting aspect of this fight is the styles clash, especially as Chimaev holds an incredible stat which could be tested by the grappling of \u2018Stillknocks\u2019.<\/p>\n
In his career so far, he has never been taken down by any opponent in the organisation, including the incredible Kamaru Usman.<\/p>\n
However, in the last six contests of the reigning champion, he has taken down each opponent.<\/p>\n
How these two match up on the night could make for one of the fights of the year, or if the challenger gets to him early, it may be a quick night\u2019s work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Khamzat Chimaev puts his undefeated record on the line against Dricus Du Plessis when they face off for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23438,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,20207,786,4120,785,85,787],"class_list":["post-23437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-dricus-du-plessis","tag-fighting","tag-khamzat-chimaev","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Khamzat](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/GettyImages-2181229426.jpg\")
Photo by Chris Unger\/Zuffa LLC<\/p>\n