It wasn’t necessarily evident during his performance in the Octagon, but Merab Dvalishvili endured his fair share of difficulties leading up to his first bantamweight title defense.
After relying on his relentless pace to pull away from Umar Nurmagomedov for a unanimous decision triumph in the UFC 311 headliner at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles on Saturday night, Dvalishvili revealed some of the ailments that limited his training. While Nurmagomedov revealed that he might have broken his hand in the opening stanza, “The Machine” claims to have dealt with with plenty of adversity of his own.