Khabib Nurmagomedov: The Eagle of Dagestan

There is a video from 1997 of a nine-year-old boy in a Dagestani village wrestling a bear cub in the dirt. The bear is bigger than the boy. The boy has an underhook. His father, who is filming, says nothing you can hear, and the boy does not look at the camera once; he is working the bear's head down the way he would work a training partner's. Twenty-one years later the same boy climbed out of a cage in Las Vegas as the most dominant lightweight the UFC had seen, with the same expression.

The short answer: Khabib Nurmagomedov is a wrestler from the mountains of Dagestan who won 29 professional fights and lost none, held the UFC lightweight title for nearly three years, submitted three of the best fighters of his era in his last three bouts and retired at 32 because he had promised his mother he would. His method was as old as the history of wrestling: take the other man down, hold him there, make him carry your weight until he cannot. What follows is the documented career, from Sildi to Fight Island.

Key facts

Born

20 September 1988, Sildi, Dagestan, Russia

Base

Freestyle wrestling, judo and combat sambo; world combat sambo champion 2009 and 2010

Professional record

29–0 (8 KO, 11 submission, 10 decision); 13–0 in the UFC

Title

UFC lightweight champion, 7 April 2018 – March 2021, three defences

Last fight

Justin Gaethje, 24 October 2020, triangle choke, round 2

Since retiring

Coach to Islam Makhachev and others; owner of Eagle FC; UFC Hall of Fame 2022

Sildi

Khabib Abdulmanapovich Nurmagomedov was born on 20 September 1988 in Sildi, a village in the Tsumadinsky District high in the mountains of Dagestan, in what was then the Soviet Union. He is an ethnic Avar. The family later moved to Kirovaul and then to Makhachkala, the republic's capital on the Caspian, but the village is where the story is told from, and where his father built a gym on the ground floor of the family house.

Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov is the reason there is a story at all. A decorated wrestler and judoka of the Soviet system and a combat sambo coach, he trained his sons and dozens of village boys in the same room, on the same mats, in a programme that made no distinction between childhood and preparation. Khabib began wrestling at eight. The bear cub, in 1997, was his father's idea, and Khabib has described it since as an experiment rather than a habit. The father's methods, and the region's, produced a generation of fighters. Dagestan, a republic of around three million people, has since sent more champions to the UFC than most countries, and nearly all of them wrestled first.

Twenty-six wins nobody in Las Vegas saw

He took up judo at fifteen and combat sambo at seventeen, and by his early twenties he had the credentials of a Russian grappling prospect: a world combat sambo championship at 74 kilograms in 2009 and another in 2010. Between them he had already started fighting for money. His professional MMA debut came on 13 September 2008 in Poltava, Ukraine, a triangle choke over Vusal Bayramov, and he fought sixteen times in Russia and Ukraine over the next three years without losing, in promotions few Western fans had heard of and on cards that survive mainly as grainy video. Those years are where the reputation was built: the long takedown chains, the ground-and-pound from inside the guard, the habit of finishing in the third round because the other man had nothing left.

The UFC signed him in late 2011. On 20 January 2012 in Nashville he made his debut against Kamal Shalorus, an Iranian-born wrestler, and choked him in the third round. Over the next two years he beat Gleison Tibau, Thiago Tavares, Abel Trujillo, on whom he landed 21 takedowns on 25 May 2013, still a UFC record for a single fight, Pat Healy, and, in April 2014, Rafael dos Anjos, a future champion, by a wide decision. He was 22–0 and, on the evidence, a title challenger. Then he disappeared for two years.

The injury years

Between the dos Anjos fight and April 2016 Khabib fought nobody. A knee injury, then another, then a rib injury, kept him out, and a fight with Tony Ferguson, the other unbeaten lightweight of the era, was booked and cancelled in 2015 and again in 2016; it would be booked and cancelled twice more, in 2017 and 2018, once because Khabib was hospitalised during his weight cut, and it never happened. The fights that did happen when he returned were not close. He beat Darrell Horcher in April 2016, submitted Michael Johnson with a kimura at UFC 205 in New York in November 2016, and outpointed Edson Barboza at UFC 219 at the end of 2017.

The pattern of his fights had by now become the thing people watched for. He would take the opponent down within the first minute, pin him against the fence, and then talk to him while hitting him. His own description of what happened next was the smother: the takedown, the top pressure, the arm trap, the round after round of an opponent carrying 70 kilograms and then some. Fighters who had prepared for it said afterwards that preparation had not helped. The weight class he fought in, and the rules he fought under, are laid out in MMA weight classes explained and MMA rules explained.

Brooklyn, April 2018

The title came, in the end, by a strange route. UFC 223 on 7 April 2018 in Brooklyn was to have been Khabib against Ferguson for the vacant belt. Ferguson injured his knee; Max Holloway, the featherweight champion, agreed to step up on six days' notice and was ruled unfit to compete by the New York commission on the day of the weigh-in; and the man who finally walked out was Al Iaquinta, a lightweight from Long Island who had been on the card in a different fight. Two days earlier, Conor McGregor had thrown a hand truck at a bus carrying Khabib and other fighters at the Barclays Center, an incident for which McGregor was later charged and pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. Khabib beat Iaquinta over five rounds, on his feet for much of it, and became lightweight champion.

The fight that followed was the biggest in the sport's history, and everyone knew it before it was booked. UFC 229, 6 October 2018, T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas: Khabib against Conor McGregor, the former two-division champion, returning after two years away. Khabib took McGregor down in the first round, hurt him standing in the second, was in trouble briefly in the third, and in the fourth took his back and forced a submission with a neck crank at 3:03. The event sold a reported 2.4 million pay-per-views, the most in UFC history.

Then Khabib climbed the fence. He went over the cage towards McGregor's team and a brawl broke out in and around the octagon; members of his own team entered the cage and attacked McGregor. In January 2019 the Nevada State Athletic Commission suspended Khabib for nine months and fined him 500,000 dollars, and suspended McGregor for six months with a 50,000-dollar fine. Khabib kept the belt. He did not fight again for eleven months.

Abu Dhabi, and a promise

He came back on 7 September 2019 at UFC 242 in Abu Dhabi against Dustin Poirier, the interim champion, and unified the titles with a rear-naked choke in the third round, after which the two men swapped shirts and Khabib's was auctioned for Poirier's charity. It was, by the standard of his career, an uneventful night. The next year was not.

On 3 July 2020 Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov died in a Moscow hospital, aged 57, after complications from COVID-19. He had been his son's only head coach, the architect of the Dagestani programme, and the reason Khabib fought at all. Khabib's team, including his American coach Javier Mendez at American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose, prepared him for one more fight. On 24 October 2020, at UFC 254 on Fight Island, the UFC's pandemic base on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi, he fought Justin Gaethje, the interim champion and the hardest-hitting lightweight in the division. Gaethje landed leg kicks in the first round. In the second Khabib took him down, moved to a triangle choke and put him to sleep at 1:34.

Then, in the cage, he took off his gloves and put them in the centre of the mat. He said he had promised his mother that he would not fight on without his father, and that this had been his last fight. He was 32 years old and 29–0. The UFC kept him at the top of its rankings for months in the hope that he would change his mind, and in March 2021 confirmed his retirement and vacated the title.

The Eagle as coach

Retirement in Khabib's case meant a change of chair. He took over the running of his father's team, and in October 2022 the fighter he had grown up beside on his father's mats, Islam Makhachev, won the lightweight title at UFC 280 in Abu Dhabi with Khabib in his corner, submitting Charles Oliveira in the second round. His cousin Umar Nurmagomedov and a stream of Dagestani fighters followed the same route into the UFC. In January 2023 Khabib announced that he was stepping back from full-time coaching to spend more time with his family, though he has since appeared in Makhachev's corner again. He also bought a Russian promotion in 2020 and relaunched it as Eagle Fighting Championship, which staged events in Russia and, in 2022, in Miami. In June 2022 the UFC inducted him into its Hall of Fame.

The papakha, the sheepskin hat he wore into every cage, has become the shorthand for a whole region's fighting culture, and there is a case that this, rather than the belt, is his legacy. Before him, Dagestan was a place wrestling coaches knew about. After him it is where the lightweight division is made. His father built that machine; the son proved it worked, then went home to run it.

Where to go next

• The grappling arts behind his game: the wrestling hub, the sambo hub and the history of sambo.
• How his sport got its rules and its weight classes: The History of MMA, MMA rules explained and MMA weight classes explained.
• Sambo against the other great submission art: Sambo vs BJJ, and judo vs wrestling for the takedown question.
• The family that made the ground game a spectacle a generation earlier: Rickson Gracie: The Family's Best Fighter.
• The MMA hub for training articles, workouts and gear.