Khamzat Chimaev is two weeks out from defending his middleweight title against Sean Strickland, but he still found time to swing at Ronda Rousey over her latest shots at UFC pay.
Chimaev, who takes an unbeaten 15-0 record into his UFC 328 title fight with Strickland, addressed Rousey’s comments during a recent video on his YouTube channel. Rousey has been criticizing the UFC’s pay structure while building toward her May 16 return against Gina Carano, arguing that the promotion does not always make the biggest fights and that fighters can find better long-term money elsewhere.
Chimaev was not interested in hearing any of it. He said:
“There would never have been Ronda Rousey without UFC.” He followed that by saying, “I hate this.”
Then, after one of his teammates called Rousey ungrateful, Chimaev agreed and added:
“If they pay good or don’t pay good, who cares. When she was Olympic champ, what did she make then?”
Watch the source post below:
https://x.com/ChampRDS/status/2047414601189376295
Rousey’s resume is exactly why this argument is not going away
Rousey is not some random former fighter taking cheap shots from the couch. She was the inaugural UFC women’s bantamweight champion, the first woman signed by the promotion, and the athlete who helped push women’s MMA into the UFC mainstream. Before that, she won Olympic bronze in judo for the United States. In MMA, she finished her career at 12-2, and for a stretch she was one of the biggest draws in the sport.
That is why her criticism still carries weight. When Rousey talks about fighter pay, she is speaking as someone who helped make the UFC a bigger business. When Chimaev answers, he is speaking as the current champion heading into an already ugly UFC 328 build with Strickland, while also being someone who has made clear before that he is making plenty of money outside the UFC.
Chimaev, though, was not trying to be nuanced. He thinks Rousey should show more gratitude to the company that gave her the platform, and he said it the way Chimaev usually says things — hard, fast, and with no interest in sanding off the edges.
