{"id":18238,"date":"2025-07-23T15:17:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T15:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/18238\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T15:17:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T15:17:07","slug":"ilia-topuria-fires-back-at-max-holloways-bmf-title-criticism-i-put-you-to-sleep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/18238\/","title":{"rendered":"Ilia Topuria fires back at Max Holloway’s BMF title criticism: ‘I put you to sleep’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ilia Topuria is unbothered by Max Holloway’s verbal jabs over his continuous flaunting of an inauthentic BMF title.<\/p>\n

Holloway (27-8 MMA, 23-8 UFC) captured the BMF strap at UFC 300 in April 2024 when he scored a last-second knockout<\/a> of Justin Gaethje. His next fight came against Topuria (17-0 MMA, 9-0 UFC) at UFC 308 in October, but the BMF belt was not on the line, and therefor Holloway technically kept it despite being stopped by strikes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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It was back up for grabs this past weekend when Holloway defeated Dustin Poirier by unanimous decision<\/a> in the UFC 318 main event, and afterward “Blessed” dissed for Topuria to keep trotting around the non-legitimate version of the silver title.<\/p>\n

That doesn’t bother Topuria one bit, he said, because even if Holloway or the UFC doesn’t recognize it as official, he’s certain that the only BMF around is himself.<\/p>\n

“That’s not my problem,” Topuria told the Nelk Boys<\/a>. “I just knocked him out. How can you still be the BMF if I knocked you out? I pointed to the ground in the first 10 seconds. You ran away. Then I caught you anyways and I put you to sleep. And you’re still the BMF? How’s that?”<\/p>\n

Holloway has made it clear he wants revenge<\/a> on now-lightweight champion Topuria in the form of a rematch. UFC CEO Dana White expressed interest in possibly running it back with the BMF officially at stake, but he did not commit to Holloway being next.<\/p>\n

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Topuria said he does not have any confirmation about his next opponent, but Holloway, Justin Gaethje, Arman Tsarukyan and Paddy Pimblett have all made the argument to having a case.<\/p>\n

“I think they are going to try to push for Justin,” Topuria said. “That’s what I think. Or maybe Paddy. There’s not even a conversation about Arman. … He needs to fight.”<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Ilia Topuria responds to Max Holloway criticism of carrying BMF title<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ilia Topuria is unbothered by Max Holloway’s verbal jabs over his continuous flaunting of an inauthentic BMF title.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18239,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[9578,49,48,1299,641,3262,9577,1698,638,82,640],"class_list":["post-18238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-bmf","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-dustin-poirier","tag-fighting","tag-ilia-topuria","tag-justin-gaethje","tag-max-holloway","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}