What Hones You<\/a>, Gaethje said he\u2019d be lying if he didn\u2019t have any.<\/p>\n\u201cI mean, it doesn\u2019t sound practical to say I never thought that it was gone,\u201d Gaethje said. \u201cBecause going through those two fights, and then the Max Holloway fight after that, it made it real difficult.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore the Max fight I was on a, what, two or three-fight winning streak? I had knocked out Dustin Poirier. I was definitely planning on fighting for the belt next. I think Oliveira had [the shot], that\u2019s when Topuria came up to lightweight and they made that fight. So I was like, shit, that kind of throws a wrench in everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gaethje battled back from his loss to Holloway to defeat Rafael Fiziev, then deliver a lopsided decision win over Paddy Pimblett in the main event of UFC 324 in January to become a two-time interim lightweight champion.<\/p>\n
Getting to the spot he was in to share the stage with Topuria was not a surprise because Gaethje believed it was just a matter of time before things came together.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never really lost hope,\u201d Gaethje explained. \u201cI always knew that I was performing better than I had, I knew that my body still felt as good as it ever did.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew that this sport was crazy, and I just had to put wins together. And, yeah, that was the mindset.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Justin Gaethje knew the craziness of MMA would always give him a glimmer of hope to accomplish the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":772607,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,85,787,1396],"class_list":["post-772606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772606","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=772606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/772607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=772606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=772606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=772606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}