CONOR McGREGOR is raring to go ahead of the fight of his life against Khabib Nurmagomedov. In a fiery press conference, the Irishman insulted his opponent saying his people were "chased to the edge of cliffs", but what was he referring to? 2 Khabib Nurmagomedov is putting his unbeaten record on the line against Conor McGregor Credit: Getty Images - Getty Where is Khabib Nurmagomedov from and how old is he? Khabib Nurmagomedov was born in Sildi, in the Russian republic of Dagestan in 1988. He is a Russian of Avar ethnicity, and a devout Muslim, as are most Avars. The republic of Dagestan is located on the border with Azerbaijan. What did Conor McGregor say to Khabib Nurmagomedov in his press conference? McGregor said that Nurmagomedov's people were known for running for the hills during invasion, in contrast to his clan which "fought the English for a hundred years". The Notorious stated: "It’s all these men are known for, they were chased from their land to the edge of cliffs. "My family, my bloodline, the McGregor clan. We stood, we fought. "We fought the English empire, so much so that our name was banished for 100 years by King James." But Nurmagomedov cheekily responded: "Is that why you speak English then?" 2 Khabib Nurmagomedov is from the volatile Russian republic of Dagestan Credit: Alamy Taken over by Russia in the 1800s, Dagestan suffered a short lived war in 1999, in which Russia and the Dagestani police fought against Islamist militants and local separatists. McGregor also mocked Nurmagomedov's father for cosying up to the strongman leader of the neighbouring Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, whose gym Khabib visited in a video. He said: "The Chechen people know what I’m talking about when I call this man a ‘coward’ when I called his father a ‘quivering coward’. "Him and Kadyrov were at a mosque together and he posted a picture of Kadyrov on his Instagram site. "Kadyrov is a Chechen dictator, a crazy man, don’t get me wrong, but Khabib’s father, ‘lick-a***, Lick-A*** O’F****** Hoolihan’ posted a picture of Kadyrov at this mosque and the caption is ‘together we are stronger’. "It’s such fake respect out of fear. "The Chechens know, the Chechen people know, that if the tables were turned and there was an opportunity for his father to stab that man in the back, he would do it in a heartbeat to take over and he did not do nothing. "And that’s why he is a quivering coward because he showed fake respect out of fear."<doc-sep>It’s time Khabib Nurmagomedov updates his weight status heading into Saturday’s (Oct. 6, 2018) UFC 229 from Las Vegas. The lightweight champion’s weight has been a hot topic before the biggest fight of his career. It’s for good reason. Nurmagomedov was missed weight before. His scheduled UFC 209 interim title bout with Tony Ferguson was called off as a result. Uncertainty brews and McGregor’s team is even concerned about the Dagestani combatant being on point at weigh-ins. It would be an extremely costly weight miss. The undefeated Nurmagomedov is most likely headed for his biggest payday. More importantly, he could finally become a mainstream star with a victory. He won’t make McGregor’s record-breaking MMA payday, but it will certainly be Khabib’s most lucrative purse. The fight has to happen first. The MMA world is on pins and needles hoping that their biggest-ever match goes off without a hitch in five days’ time. Khabib has certainly dealt with a ton of serious injuries in recent years. But fear not, he claims. ‘The Eagle’ said on this week’s “Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show” that he was thankful to be in good shape. He clarified that his weight was good: “Now I have belt, I am undisputed, undefeated. Now, this is my third fight in my last nine months. It’s like we part of the pay-per-view, everything And like five days before the fight, this is crazy. “Now we’re here, my weight is good, my shape is good. I’m 30 years old, I’m still hungry, I’m still young for this sport. This is crazy.” The champ claimed he was already at 166 pounds and would make weight “no problem” for the match. Beyond that, Khabib obviously has a long history with McGregor. More Than Personal The Irish former champion was arrested for his infamous bus attack this April. He threw a metal dolly through a bus containing Nurmagomedov prior to UFC 223. Because of the scene, Helwani asked Khabib if the fight was more than just a title defense. “The Eagle” admitted that indeed it was. Nurmagomedov claimed he was chomping at the bit to make McGregor pay: “Yeah, I agree. This is a little bit more than defending my title, more than fight for the title. You know this more than like, fight. It’s a little bit personal for, of course, and you know, I wanna make this guy pay, you know? This guy gonna pay about everything, what he say, what he did. “In like five days, I’m gonna be very happy. We here now, and we very close.” But he stopped short at sounding cocky before the biggest fight of his life. The always-humble Khabib acknowledged that McGregor had lethal timing and striking skills he could not underestimate: “I’m not underestimating this guy, I know this guy have good timing, good boxing.”<doc-sep>We are just four sleeps away from witnessing one of the biggest title fights in Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) history as Khabib Nurmagomedov will defend his Lightweight strap against Conor McGregor this Saturday night (Oct. 6, 2018) at UFC 229 in Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s a championship bout that riddled with bad blood stemming from Conor’s wild rampage in Brooklyn, N.Y., a few months ago, as “Notorious” trashed a bus full of UFC fighters in an attempt to get at “The Eagle.” Location was not sent prior. After a few legal arguments and contract negotiations, the contracts were signed, sealed and delivered for the two men to finally get it on inside the Octagon in a championship bout that is expected to shatter box office records for the promotion. Prior to the much-anticipated showdown — which will see McGregor fight inside the cage for the first time in two years — UFC will premiere “Bad Blood,” an inside look at the rivalry between Khabib and McGregor. The one hour special is will debut on tonight (Tues., Oct. 2, 2018) at 7:00 p.m. ET/ 4 p.m. PT on Fox Sports 1.<doc-sep>How big is Saturday night’s lightweight title fight between Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov? How much does it mean for the UFC to have a grand slam of a pay-per-view after so many quiet ones barely registered on the “event” scale? How desperate is the promotion just to see the two principals walk to the cage on fight night, with very literal intent of doing each other harm? The answers: (a) colossally huge, (b) it means everything, and (c) at this point UFC president Dana White is like George Bailey screaming “I want to live again!” in It’s a Wonderful Life. He’s as excited as he is desperate. For much of this year the drama surrounding a given UFC event has tended more toward doom, usually because nobody’s ever quite sure who’s going to show up to the octagon on fight night. The very first UFC show of 2018 took place in St. Louis and was supposed to feature a welterweight bout between Zak Cummings and Thiago Alves, but the fight was scrapped when Cummings slipped in his bathroom two days before the bout and cracked his skull. On that same card, Uriah Hall—trying to slim down to 185 pounds for a fight with Vitor Belfort—was forced off the card after he suffered a “slight heart attack” during his cut. Bizarre? Not in the UFC, where Murphy’s law is the only law. According to MMA Junkie’s resident statistician, Mike Bohn, who has compiled a list of all the fights that have fallen apart for one reason or another, 21 main and co-main events have been altered, postponed or otherwise canceled so far in 2018. Twenty-one big-billed fights. The UFC’s luck hasn’t been bad, it’s been tragic. Perhaps none of these last-minute fallouts was more perplexing than Tony Ferguson’s back in April. He was supposed to defend his then-interim lightweight title against Nurmagomedov in the main event at UFC 223 in a possible prelude to a fight with McGregor, but he didn’t even make it to Brooklyn. After filming a hype segment for the fight at Fox studios in Los Angeles a week beforehand, Ferguson—and I assure you, I am not making this up—tripped over some production cables in the back and trashed his knee. UFC replaced him with Max Holloway, who never made it to the scale because the severity of his weight cut was too much on short notice. And so Holloway was replaced with Al Iaquinta, a native New Yorker who ended up getting ceremoniously abused for five long rounds against Nurmagomedov. All of this ties into Saturday’s epic McGregor-Nurmagomedov fight, and not just because of Khabib’s record. It was a backstage brawl that stole headlines that weekend and ultimately set up UFC 229’s main event. Here’s a very MMA headline in 2018: The backstory to the single biggest fight in UFC history is a dolly. Nurmagomedov had a minor hallway faceoff with a fighter named Artem Lobov in the week leading up to UFC 223. Thing was, Lobov was McGregor’s training partner, and so McGregor took a private plane to New York from Ireland to confront the Dagestani menace. But rather than confront Nurmagomedov directly, McGregor and his band of wildlings attacked the bus he was on after a media day had just wrapped up. McGregor picked up a hand truck and tried to launch it through the bus’s tinted window, assuming that Nurmagomedov was somewhere therein. The shattered glass rained down on multiple fighters sitting onboard, including Michael Chiesa and the flyweight Ray Borg, each of whom had to withdraw from their respective fights with injuries (more fluky last-minute cancellations). McGregor was arrested and charged with criminal mischief and assault and is subsequently being sued by Chiesa, and Dana White called the episode the most disgusting thing he’d ever seen. How disgusting was it? So disgusting that the footage of McGregor’s attack—from multiple artistic angles—became the lead material for all the UFC 229 promo videos. Where some might see bad taste, the UFC sees bad blood. When asked about using the footage to sell the fight, White said it was part of the story—why would the UFC omit the single most appalling (read: sellable) chapter in the history of the rivalry? And that’s how we got to McGregor versus Nurmagomedov, a fight that’s been festering for the two years since McGregor last fought in the UFC. His hiatus was broken up by a Get Rich Quick Scheme of a boxing match with Floyd Mayweather last August, but from the UFC’s perspective it’s been more like a time of famine. With no McGregor to lean on—and with Ronda Rousey joining Brock Lesnar in the WWE, and Jon Jones serving a 15-month suspension for using a banned substance—the company has suffered. Last month’s UFC 228 pay-per-view featuring a welterweight title fight between Tyron Woodley and Darren Till did somewhere in the vicinity of 150,000 PPV buys. UFC 227, which was anchored to a bantamweight title fight between Cody Garbrandt and T.J. Dillashaw, did around 300,000. By comparison, White said ahead of the first press conference at Radio City Music Hall on Sept. 20 that McGregor-Nurmagomedov is trending toward 2.5 million buys, which would shatter the previous record of 1.65 million that McGregor did for his rematch with Nate Diaz at UFC 202. You can see why the UFC is desperate for a McGregor return. If you added up all the buys of UFC PPVs in 2018, beginning with UFC 220 in January, you wouldn’t come near 2.5 million buys. In the UFC, there are ordinary events featuring great fighters, and there are the game-changing events that McGregor puts on—the kind that can’t help but boost faith in MMA as a sport, and a media property, in the eyes of interested parties. Parties like Endeavor (formerly WME-IMG), which dished out $4 billion to purchase the UFC from the Fertitta brothers back in 2016, and ESPN, which just entered into a five-year deal with the UFC that kicks off at the beginning of 2019.<doc-sep>
Last updated on .From the section Mixed Martial Arts Russia's Khabib Nurmagomedov is undefeated in 26 MMA fights Conor McGregor says he will beat Khabib Nurmagomedov by "devastating knockout" in his comeback UFC fight in Las Vegas on Saturday. Speaking on Ariel Helwani's MMA Show external-link , Irishman McGregor added he would "never announce his retirement" from MMA. McGregor, 30, will return to the octagon for the first time in almost two years when he fights Russia's undefeated UFC lightweight champion Nurmagomedov in UFC 229. "I'm going to maul him," McGregor said. "I will clatter him; he will crumble. I don't think he can take a smack. He reacts like a novice." McGregor's last appearance in UFC came in November 2016 when he beat Eddie Alvarez to add the lightweight belt to his featherweight title. He was later stripped of both titles because of inactivity, with Nurmagomedov being installed as lightweight champion earlier this year - a decision that still grates with McGregor. In an earlier interview with TheMacLife.com external-link , he said he "fell out of love with the game" but was now "more hungry" as he returns to the octagon. "I spent my entire life's work to win those two UFC titles," he said. "I sacrificed so much to gain those world titles and then as soon as I win the second world title - I hadn't even been offered a featherweight contest - and the featherweight title was taken off me. "Many things irritated me in the game and just watching it all unfold, I just became a lot more hungry to come back and show who the real king is. "I fell out of love with the game for a bit, went off and did my own thing, had many things going on and now I'm back. I'm hungry to compete and we're here right on the cusp of it."