Caio Borralho believes former training partner Khamzat Chimaev beats Robert Whittaker in their upcoming matchup.
Chimaev is scheduled to trade leather against Whittaker at UFC 308 on Oct. 26 at the Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi. Borralho was Chimaev’s main sparring partner for a scheduled matchup against Nate Diaz in September 2022, a fight which never came to fruition. “The Natural” believes Chimaev’s opponents can’t gauge the true extent of “Borz’s” wrestling prowess until they are sharing the Octagon with him. Borralho notes that Chimaev is coming off a majority decision win over former champ Kamaru Usman, who has left behind ace grapplers like Demian Maia, Rafael dos Anjos and Gilbert Burns in his wake. While the Brazilian expects Chimaev to beat Whittaker, he isn’t completely counting “Bobby Knuckles” out given his championship history.
“I already training with him, spent some time in Sweden with him for his training camp against Nate Diaz, the fight that never happened,” Borralho told Submission Radio. “I was there training with him every day, was his main sparring partner for this camp, and I think it’s a very tough fight for Whittaker because Khamzat has very great great wrestling. And there’s one thing about Khamzat that people don’t realize too much. They don’t know what kind of level to expect from him. They know by seeing but when [they] feel it, think it’s a little bit different. This kind of level of wrestling, of grappling, I think the best wrestler in the division is Khamzat. And we saw how he dominated Kamaru Usman, that’s a great, great wrestler that fought Demian Maia and he got dominated the way he was by Khamzat… I think this fight goes to Khamzat. I think Khamzat is gonna dominate him in the wrestling in the ground. But Whittaker was a champion also, we cannot doubt a champion also.”
Chimaev has dealt with both issues on the scales and inactivity in recent years. The Chechen-born Swede showed no remorse for missing weight by a whopping 7.5 pounds for the aforementioned matchup against Diaz and ended up fighting Kevin Holland, who was game enough to accept on a day’s notice. Most recently, Chimaev pulled out of a scheduled matchup against Whittaker at UFC Saudi Arabia this past June, citing a “lung infection’”among other sickness. He was replaced by Ikram Aliskerov, who suffered his second ever career loss against Whittaker via first-round knockout.
Borralho believes a lot of Chimaev’s ill health might have to do with him overtraining. Borralho detailed a ridiculously long session of the Chechen-born Swede, who trains more than anyone else in the room without fail.
“He trains a lot, like I didn’t see any other guy in my life that trains as much as he trains,” Borralho said. “Maybe that’s why sometimes he kills his body and doesn’t make it to the fight, but definitely a guy that [trains more than] everyone in the room. There was a time that we did like five rounds sparring and after sparring was done, he did like three or four rounds of pads and then after that, he did like a 30-minute run and I was like, ‘What the f—k is this guy doing?’”
