Laura Sanko has given an illuminating perspective to the narrative centered on Ilia Topuria switching up his training camp arrangement in the lead up to UFC 317. This was touched upon during her podcast One on One, which she co-hosts with Din Thomas, as Sanko said,
“Speaking of his coaches, though—no longer training under those coaches that he came up with from day one. This is the first time that he’s trained in his own camp. I was researching this, and basically, Ilia had so many sponsor-type obligations that were in and about Madrid that he moved to Madrid. It was just too much for him to do the four-hour back-and-forth type thing."
"So he kind of did his own training camp this time without them in it. Again, that leads me to believe that, in his entire career, he took it upon himself to kind of do his own thing. We read a lot into that—‘Oh, I can’t believe he left his coaches.’ But at the end of the day, if they were that instrumental and he was that dependent on them, we’re talking about a world champion."
Sanko continued, "He’s flying these guys out to train him if it was that instrumental to him. The reality is, I think that he did a lot of this work on getting good himself. They’re on good terms, too. It certainly wasn’t any sort of bad-blood type of breakup, just logistics.”
Ilia Topuria and the importance of Climent Club to his MMA career
Topuria aims to enter rarefied air as he attempts to become a two-division UFC champion this weekend, as he aims to claim the vacant lightweight belt against the former 155-pound titleholder Charles Oliveira. But what is the backstory on Topuria striking out on his own now?
Ilia Topuria had previously been training with Agustin and Jorge Climent in Alicante, Spain at their facility Climent Club. The former featherweight champion and his brother Aleksandre Topuria have been training under the tutelage of the Climent brothers since both began their journeys in mixed martial arts. As Sanko mentioned above, the change in camp seems to be more of a logistics thing with proximity and outside of the cage projects preventing the kind of work that was once had.
The Georgian-Spanish fighter has addressed the change in camps, and it seems like there is no negative sentiment at all attached to the split as Ilia Topuria stated [via Bloody Elbow],
“We thank them for all these years of mutual learning and growth, and they wholeheartedly wish them all the best in all their projects.”
