Fifteen wins. Twelve finishes. Not a single round dropped in any of them. By the time Khamzat Chimaev walked into the cage at UFC 328 in Newark, the combat sports world had spent six years searching for a credible answer to the Borz — and coming up empty. Sean Strickland found one, and it took 25 minutes of walking through hell to do it.
Chimaev is 15-1. The run is over. But the run itself demands a proper accounting.
From Chechnya to Stockholm
Chimaev was born in Chechnya and moved to Sweden as a teenager, eventually settling in Stockholm where he trained combat sports at the AllStars Training Center — one of the best MMA gyms in Europe, the same environment that produced Alexander Gustafsson and has sharpened dozens of world-class fighters. He developed a wrestling-heavy base informed by sambo and freestyle wrestling, added striking that got sharper with every year, and built an engine that seemed to operate at one constant speed: full throttle.
His amateur and early pro career ran through regional European promotions without fanfare. When the UFC signed him in 2020, he had a clean record and a reputation that had barely crossed the Atlantic.
Two Fights in Ten Days
The UFC used Yas Island in Abu Dhabi as a controlled bubble during the pandemic — no crowds, no travel complications, a conveyor belt of fights in a contained environment. Chimaev used it to announce himself in the most dramatic way possible.
He fought Rhys McKee on July 16, 2020. First-round finish. He fought John Phillips on July 25. First-round finish. Ten days. Two wins. Both stoppages. The promotion hadn’t seen a debut like it in years.
Then came Gerald Meerschaert. A veteran submission specialist with thirty-plus professional wins and the kind of grappling credentials that had derailed plenty of UFC welterweights. The fight lasted 17 seconds. Chimaev landed a right hand, followed up, and Meerschaert was finished before most fans had oriented themselves to what they were watching. The performance earned a $50,000 bonus. “Give me No. 1 now,” Chimaev told the broadcast camera. Nobody laughed at him.
The COVID Detour
The momentum hit a wall nobody expected. Chimaev contracted COVID-19 in late 2020 and suffered complications severe enough that he publicly considered retirement — describing symptoms that lingered for months, affecting his breathing and training capacity long after the initial infection cleared. In January 2021, he posted that he was quitting MMA. The sport held its breath.
He came back. Against Li Jingliang in October 2021, he looked like he’d never left — a first-round finish that was nearly as effortless as his Fight Island wins. The COVID detour had cost him momentum but hadn’t cost him anything that mattered inside the cage.
The Burns Fight: The Proof
Gilbert Burns was the test Chimaev needed to pass before anyone took the hype seriously. Burns was a legitimate title contender — a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu ace who had given Kamaru Usman genuine trouble for two rounds in a championship fight. The conventional wisdom said Burns’ ground game would be the first credible threat Chimaev had faced.
It wasn’t quite that simple. Burns actually hurt him in the opening round, putting on the board the clearest evidence anyone had that Chimaev could be touched. But Chimaev absorbed it, took the fight where he wanted it, and won a split decision that was worth more in credibility than most highlight-reel finishes. He’d been hit hard and kept going. The narrative around him shifted from “exciting prospect” to “legitimate contender.”
The UFC 279 Weekend and the Diaz Statement
UFC 279 in September 2022 is worth recounting for context. The fight week was chaos — weight misses, matchup reshuffles, and a card that went through multiple restructures in the final days before the event. Chimaev ended up fighting Nate Diaz in a welterweight bout that was as much spectacle as it was sport. He submitted Diaz in the fourth round, closing a chapter on Diaz’s UFC career and positioning himself as the most physically dominant fighter at 170 lbs.
From there, the question wasn’t whether Chimaev could compete at the top level. It was which weight class would host his title challenge — and whether the middleweight division had anyone capable of stopping what he was building.
The Middleweight Title
Chimaev moved his primary operations to 185 lbs, where his size and physical tools translated even more clearly into structural advantages. The UFC middleweight title changed hands multiple times in the years following Israel Adesanya’s long reign — Sean Strickland beat Adesanya, Dricus du Plessis beat Strickland, and the belt kept moving — before Chimaev’s path to the championship materialised. When he won the UFC middleweight title, it confirmed what the numbers had long suggested: nobody at 185 lbs had found a formula to stop what he was doing.
Entering UFC 328 as champion, 15-0, with 12 finishes and zero rounds ceded across his entire UFC run, Chimaev was not an ordinary fighter defending an ordinary title. He was the current answer to the question of who was the best middleweight in the world.
Newark: The Night Strickland Walked Through Everything
Strickland’s formula has never been complicated. He walks forward. He throws volume. He absorbs whatever comes back. At UFC 328 in Newark, he executed that blueprint for 25 minutes — and it was enough to take a split decision: 48-47, 48-47, 47-48.
What Strickland revealed about Chimaev that night was that the finishing machine had a weakness: a fighter willing to accept punishment and keep moving, resetting, throwing more punches without attempting to take the fight to the ground. Chimaev’s finishing game requires either a takedown or a striking sequence that ends the fight. Strickland gave him neither opportunity in clean enough form to finish, for 25 rounds of championship action.
What nobody in the building knew was that Strickland had separated his shoulder four days before the fight. He revealed it in the post-fight press conference. It made the win bigger in retrospect, and the loss no less instructive about what Chimaev’s game still needs.
For the full UFC 328 card breakdown including co-main results, see our UFC 328 full card recap.
The Aftermath
The immediate post-fight reaction from Chimaev’s corner included discussion of moving to light heavyweight — vacating the 185 lb belt and targeting a different title at 205 lbs. By the time the dust settled on the UFC 328 weekend, that plan appeared to be on hold. Chimaev goes to 15-1. The championship run pauses.
Dricus du Plessis wasted no time entering the conversation. DDP holds wins over both Strickland and the Chimaev who held the belt — making his post-fight comment (“I guess this makes me world champion again”) one of the better-constructed pieces of fight-week trolling in recent memory. Whether the UFC gives DDP a title shot or books a Strickland-Chimaev rematch is the central question in the middleweight division heading into the second half of 2026.
Where Chimaev Stands
A 15-1 record with 12 finishes and a UFC title does not become a lesser résumé because of one split-decision loss. Chimaev is 29 years old. He has the physical tools, the wrestling base, the striking, and the conditioning to compete at the elite level for years. The loss to Strickland exposed a tactical question — volume pressure over 25 minutes — not a fundamental structural flaw.
The UFC middleweight division’s next 18 months runs through three fighters: Strickland, DDP, and Chimaev. All three have beaten at least one of the others. Nobody has a clean lineage. The Borz is in the middle of it, and the sport is better for it.
Fifteen wins. Twelve finishes. One loss to a two-time champion who walked through a separated shoulder to take the decision. Whatever comes next, the record stands on its own terms.
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