When Khabib Nurmagomedov stepped away from combating in October 2020, following his father Abdulmanap’s dying simply three months earlier, he wasn’t strolling right into a quiet retirement. He was strolling right into a staff that all of a sudden wanted somebody to guide it. That somebody turned out to be him.
Khabib Nurmagomedov On Becoming Team Leader
“Somehow, when I finished my career I became the oldest in my team,” Khabib explained in a recent interview with WorldSportsSummit. “I’ve to take management. Who’s gonna take over? You can not simply go away them alone. I’ve to maintain persevering with my father’s legacy.”
The transition wasn’t something Khabib had anticipated as his entire life, he’d been the student. As a kid growing up in Dagestan, he trained alongside wrestlers and fighters much older than him in his father’s gym, a space tucked on the ground floor of their family home. There were rules, younger fighters were always wrong, older fighters were always right. That hierarchy existed for a reason. But when Abdulmanap died at age 57 from COVID-19 complications, Khabib found himself at the opposite end of that equation.
He didn’t have a choice. “It doesn’t work like this,” he said about simply walking away. “Today, I become a success, I am champion, I am on top. OK, see you guys tomorrow.”
So Khabib took over the fitness center. Islam Makhachev, his cousin Umar, fellow fighter Usman, all youthful, all seeking to him now. The strategy he introduced wasn’t tentative. When Khabib coaches, there’s no debate. “There isn’t a freedom of speech. All people do what I say. There isn’t a 50/50,” he mentioned, describing his teaching model. “If I say in or out, there isn’t any 50/50.”
Islam Makhachev, now the UFC light-weight champion, describes coaching camps below Khabib as relentlessly demanding however by no means arbitrary. Twelve rounds on the baggage, a 30-minute run, then sparring the subsequent morning. “If you wish to be champion, you must comply with the way in which champs did,” Makhachev said. “He is aware of the way it works.”
The irony is Khabib overtly admits coaching is more durable than combating. “I didn’t know it will be so exhausting… This teaching life is totally completely different from combating life. I can solely speak. I can’t do something. I can solely give my brothers recommendation and keep outdoors the cage. This isn’t what I’ve executed all my life. This is the reason it’s a bit little bit of a headache for me.”
