It\u2019s been nearly two years since Shavkat Rakhmonov has fought and the guy is still dealing with endless knee injuries.<\/p>\n
The Kazakh fighter was a top UFC welterweight contender and even managed to get a title fight booked against then-champ Belal Muhammad. But when Muhammad withdrew from the fight with a foot injury, Rakhmonov stayed on the card to fight Ian Machado Garry. That decision was a huge mistake, because \u201cNomad\u201d went into the fight with a badly injured knee<\/a> and only messed it up worse inching out a decision<\/a> against Garry.<\/p>\n Now, 21 months later, Rakhmonov is still wearing a massive knee brace in a new interview with ALF Global where he discussed his choice to fight injured.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are bound to make plenty of mistakes,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you really look at it, I also made a wide variety of mistakes throughout my sports career. I actually shouldn\u2019t have even fought Ian Machado Garry at all. With injuries like that, I shouldn\u2019t have fought at all. I just took a risk.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the Kazakh way. Kazakhs are very daring. They\u2019re not afraid. If it had been some other Dagestani fighter like Khabib or Islam Makhachev, they definitely would\u2019ve refused.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI already had an injury going into the Ian Garry fight,\u201d he added. \u201cI stepped up, I hadn\u2019t fought for a year, I wanted to fight. Even before that, I had health problems, too, and it turned out there were only two weeks left before the Ian Garry fight. That old injury was still bothering me a lot. My leg was swollen.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen he was striking me, it was probably because I completely lacked a ligament. I couldn\u2019t really feel that strike, in general.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s tough hearing Shavkat go back and forth between knowing he screwed up fighting with one leg and still pretending it was the daring and superior choice. His knee is completely destroyed now, and he did it so UFC 310 \u2014 an event no one thinks about any more \u2014 had a semi-decent co-main event. The daring thing to do would have been looking after his own health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s been nearly two years since Shavkat Rakhmonov has fought and the guy is still dealing with endless…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":882803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85,1396],"class_list":["post-882802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882802","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=882802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/882803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}