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Ahead of their fight for the UFC welterweight title at the main-event of UFC 245, Colby Covington left no stone unturned to try and get inside the head of his opponent and the reigning king of the welterweight division Kamaru Usman. The former interim welterweight champion Covington aimed a barrage of insults at his opponent, ranging from his fighting style to alleging that he uses PEDs in the press conferences held for the event.
Covington even went to the extent of bad-mouthing one of the founders of the Blackzilians, late Glenn Robinson, whose team Usman previously represented on season 21 of The Ultimate Fighter by saying that he would be watching Usman 'from hell'.
In a recent interaction with MMA Fighting, Usman hit back at Covington for insulting a deceased man.
“The man has passed away and passed on. What more do you stand to gain from continuing to try and degrade his name. That’s kind of a line you don’t cross. You let dead men sleep. Unfortunately, he hasn’t learned that lesson.”
Usman vehemently denied having taken any PEDs at any stage in his career and said that he only came to know about what EPO means after Covington accused him of using steroids at a recent press-conference.
“He kept saying that, and I’m like what is that? I didn’t know what that was, and then somebody explained to me what it was. I haven’t changed since the first moment I came to the UFC. I haven’t changed from my first professional fight to my last fight. I look the exact same because I put in the exact same amount of work each and every time.”
The Nigerian Nightmare dismissed Covington as a desperate attention seeker and insisted that the latter's insults don't mean a thing to him.
“That’s the M.O. of the sport, that’s kind of where we’re at in the sport nowadays. To where it’s just, ‘I need attention however I can get it.' The way they see it is, ‘I’d rather have a bad name than no name.’ The competitor in me has to understand and detach and just wait for my moment because none of that is going to matter. At the end of the day, god willing, he steps into that cage, and when we hit each other for the first time, he’s going to understand that it’s different.”
