Prologue — Character
For a long time, my life was surrounded by victories: belts, goals achieved, and moments I had imagined thousands of times before I ever lived them. Over the years, however, I have come to understand something. Winning teaches you a great deal about what you are capable of; losing can teach you who you are.
A result can change many things: a record, a belt changing hands, or what people say about you for a night. But there is one thing no result can take away from you: character.
Today I understand that this has always been my real story. Not the story of a man who never fell, but of someone who, every time life placed something in front of him, chose to keep going. Because the outcome defines one night; character defines a lifetime.
And to understand where that character comes from, I have to go back many years.
Chapter 1 — The Promise
I remember a European jiu-jitsu championship in Lisbon. I was very young. I had gone there to compete alongside my brother, and I lost a match on points. Afterwards, I sat down in the stands. The competition carried on in front of me, but I was somewhere else. I was thinking.
Then I felt something I can still remember with absolute clarity, and I told myself: “I’m going to be somebody.”
When you are a child, you do not really know how to explain what a sentence like that means. Of course, you dream. You think about winning competitions, travelling, having cars, clothes, and all those things that, at that age, represent success. But behind all of it there was something much deeper.
I watched my mother and father work. I saw the life we lived, much like millions of other families, and I wanted to change it. I wanted to give them peace of mind, to give the people I loved the freedom to live better. So, when that boy sitting in the stands thought, “I’m going to be somebody,” what he was really doing was making a promise.
I still did not know how I would do it, how long it would take, or what I would have to sacrifice. I did not even know how far I could go. I knew only one thing: I wanted to build a different life for my family.
That day, a champion wasn’t born. A promise was.
Chapter 2 — Coming Home
There are moments that change you without you realizing it while they are happening. One of the happiest I can remember came after spending almost six years away from my parents. They were in Spain; we were in Georgia. Between the distance, the difficulties with the paperwork, and a family reunification process that seemed endless, all we could do was wait for the day when we could finally be together again.
When you are little, your parents are your world. Your father is invincible: the man you believe no one can beat, the man who can protect you from anything. Your parents are your heroes.
One day we were told that our family reunification had been approved. I remember my father arriving to take my brother and me to Spain. It was one of the happiest moments of my life and, at the same time, one of the hardest, because going back to our parents meant saying goodbye to my sisters, my grandparents, my friends, and everyone I had known until then.
That day I understood something I would understand much better with time: decisive moments can hurt you and make you happy at the same time. I was leaving a place I loved to return to the people I loved most.
Spain was an adventure: a new country, a new language, a new culture, a new life. Without knowing it, that experience gave me something that would stay with me forever: the ability to begin again. Changing cities or countries, meeting people, adapting, walking into an unfamiliar place without knowing exactly what would happen… none of it frightened me anymore.
I had learned very early that home was not necessarily a place; home was my people. Maybe that is why, whenever life has forced me to start over, some part of me already knew how.
Chapter 3 — Learning to Believe
Before we arrived in Spain, we had lived through very difficult times. We had experienced the 2008 war in Georgia, spent years away from our parents, and gone through situations that, when you are a child, you do not always know how to explain, but that stay inside you. Even so, I remember one feeling very strongly: this will pass.
I do not know where it came from. I simply had faith. I felt that moment would not last forever, that our life could change. And it did.
When we arrived in Spain, it felt as though an entirely new door had opened. We were back with our parents, living in a residential complex with a swimming pool and a paddle court. Our school was nearby, and every day we met someone new. To me, everything was incredible. Even learning Spanish became an adventure. My brother and I set ourselves the goal of speaking it within six months, and we threw ourselves into it.
Then came the gym; then sport and the first competitions. Our parents supported us, but little by little we understood that our dreams would also demand responsibility from us. If we wanted to compete, travel, and keep moving forward, we would have to work and find a way to sustain that path.
That was when I began to understand something: when you choose what you truly love, repetition takes on a different meaning. You will have to do the same thing thousands of times—train, repeat, make mistakes, start again—which is why it matters so much to choose something you do not resent repeating. I had found it. I had chosen sport out of love, and I could return to the gym every day.
But even above discipline, there was something I never lost: faith. Even without proof that things would work out, I believed they could. Life had already taught me that a difficult situation could change completely, and so I learned to believe before I had proof.
Later I understood that many of the most important things I have achieved began exactly that way: first I believed in them; then I worked to make them real.
Chapter 4 — The Leap
At fifteen, we decided that, looking back now, was enormous. At the time, we did not fully understand what it meant. My brother, who was sixteen, was the one who spoke to my father. We told him we wanted to commit ourselves completely to sport, that this was not a hobby, and that we wanted to dedicate our lives to it.
We could not promise that we would become champions or show them a contract. We had no guarantees. We were two kids with an enormous dream and an almost irrational faith in what we were doing. Our parents saw our dedication, how passionate we were, and the qualities we had for the sport. They trusted us.
At fifteen, you still do not fully understand the price of a decision like that. You do not think about what you will be doing a decade later; you only know that you have found something you love. We started with Brazilian jiu-jitsu, grappling, some wrestling, and MMA classes. Then came my first amateur fight.
I still remember the fear. I arrived, looked at my opponent, and thought, “What am I doing here?” He looked like a fully grown man to me. For a moment I even thought about not stepping in there, but I did—and I beat him. There was a strange situation: the fight was restarted, and I beat him again. There was a strange situation, the fight was restarted, and I finished him again. What mattered that night, though, was not winning. It was meeting fear. You can imagine a thousand times how you will react to something, but you do not really know until it is standing in front of you. That day, I was afraid, and I moved forward anyway.
Over the years came more training and more fights, weight cuts, travel, and the responsibilities of adult life. Then I understood something I could not have understood at fifteen: I had chosen a path, and I had devoted my hours to walking it. While others studied for different professions, I studied fighting; while they built their lives, I built mine. My responsibility was to make that decision worth it.
At eighteen, my professional career began. There were fights across Europe—Finland, Belgium—and then Brave. Then came Bahrain, a night that became one of the turning points of my life.
In the first round, I took a very hard kick to the head and went down. In that instant, all theory disappears. You can tell yourself a thousand times that you will never give up and believe you know who you are, but until reality hits you, you do not fully know how you will respond. I responded. I got back up, kept fighting, and ended up winning.
That day I did not simply discover that I could win a fight. I discovered how my character responded when everything turned against me. And I knew one thing for certain: I could become world champion. Not because I believed no one could hurt me, or because I felt invincible, but for precisely the opposite reason. I had learned that I could be hit, knocked down, taken somewhere I had never been before—and that even then, I would try to get back up.
That day, I did not just win a fight. I discovered who I was.
Chapter 5 — The Dream Becomes Real
There are moments you imagine so many times that you eventually convince yourself you know exactly how they will happen. For years I thought about the call from the UFC. In my mind, it would come at the perfect moment: when I was in peak condition, training, physically and mentally prepared, with everything under control. But life almost never asks whether you are ready.
It was during COVID, and I had just been through a pretty bad case of it. For several days I had barely been able to get off the couch. For someone who had built so much of his life around his body, training, and feeling strong, it was a very strange sensation: my body was not responding the way it normally did.
When I finally tested negative on a PCR test, I decided to go for a run and gave myself a simple goal: thirty minutes. After ten minutes, I was already struggling to breathe; after fifteen, I had to turn back. I returned completely exhausted and sat down on some steps, trying to breathe, thinking that the effects of COVID were still inside my body.
At that exact moment, the phone rang. It was Malki Kawa, my manager at the time. The UFC had called him because Youssef Zalal had lost his opponent and there was a possibility, I could step in. My debut would be eight days later, in Abu Dhabi. His recommendation was clear: I should take the fight.
The strange thing is that I did not need much time to think. There was no “no” in my mind, not even a list of problems. My answer came immediately from somewhere inside me: yes, I’m going.
That decision was not being made only by the Ilia sitting exhausted on those steps. It was also being made by the boy who had spent years dreaming of that moment, by every hour of training, every competition, every journey, every time I had imagined myself making it there. I had spent years preparing to receive that call. The only thing I had not prepared for was the way it would come.
Then the problems began. I was eleven or twelve kilos (24–26 pounds) above the division limit and had eight days to lose them. I needed a specific visa to compete and had to travel from Alicante to Madrid to arrange it. Signing with the UFC also required an enormous number of medical clearances: blood tests, examinations, and checks that normally take time. We did not have any.
Many people helped us speed up the process, but every hour mattered: Madrid, the embassy, the hospital, medical tests, the weight cut, the journey, and, finally, Abu Dhabi. Through all of it, my body was still recovering from COVID.
Until then, my plan had been completely different. I was supposed to travel to Miami to train and prepare while I waited for an opportunity in the UFC, and I had organized my resources around that idea. Suddenly there was no plan. There was an opportunity, and everything else had to be solved as we went.
There was also the money. By then I could support myself through fighting, but I was still living practically month to month. Travelling, bringing my team, and covering those expenses was not insignificant for me. There were more than enough reasons to be afraid: Would the visa be approved? Would I make weight? Would my body respond? Would we complete the medical requirements in time? But there was one question that never appeared: “Do I take the fight?” The answer was always yes.
For a moment I thought about asking for advice, calling someone and asking what I should do. Then I asked myself, “Who am I going to call?” No one could live that moment for me. There are decisions for which no one can give you the perfect answer, because no one has lived exactly your life. You can listen to advice and to the people you love, but there comes a point when you need to hear something deeper: your instinct.
I had always trusted mine, and it was telling me to keep going. I did not know how I would solve everything. I knew I had to.
When I received the UFC contract, I was alone. I opened it and just stared at it. For years, those three letters had been a dream. Now they were in front of me, printed on a contract with my name on it. I signed, and I remember exactly what I felt: “Wow. I did it. My life just changed.”
Almost everything still remained to be done—the visa, the travel, the weight, the fight—but that piece of paper meant something: I was no longer a kid trying to reach the UFC. I was a UFC fighter.
I travelled to Abu Dhabi with Agustín and Jorge Climent, my coaches at the time. Arriving there during the pandemic felt like entering another world. They had created a bubble to stage the events: constant checks, PCR tests, quarantines, and people in full protective equipment waiting to receive us. Everything felt strange and, while I was still trying to take in where I was, another battle was waiting for me: the weight.
There were moments during the cut when, truthfully, I did not know if I would make it. Those moments force you to face yourself. To some extent, we all live conditioned by our memories: we remember the times things went wrong and fear returning to that place. I could not spend those eight days looking backward. I had to live from the image of what I wanted to build—to stop living from my memories and start living from my vision.
That was when I understood something that would return to me many times: my nightmares could remind me of everything that might go wrong, but my dreams were bigger. My dreams destroyed my doubts.
I made weight, stepped into the Octagon, and won. After the fight, Dana White came over to congratulate me. He spoke about how difficult it was to accept a fight on such short notice and to face a tough opponent. But when I think about those eight days, the victory is not the first thing I remember.
I remember the steps and being unable to breathe after running for fifteen minutes; the phone call, the contract, the visa, the hunger of the weight cut, the uncertainty. More than anything, I remember that despite all of it, I never thought about turning back.
Some opportunities appear when you least expect them. They may even come when you least want them. Maybe you will never feel completely ready for them, but some trains pass only once. I had spent my whole life waiting for that train, and when it arrived, it did not find me in the condition I had imagined. I did not know exactly how I was going to do it. I only knew I had to get on.
And I did.
Chapter 6 — The Conquest
After my debut in Abu Dhabi, we went straight to Miami.
I had achieved something I had dreamed about for years: I was a UFC fighter. But getting there had never been the final goal. I had not worked my entire life simply to be in the UFC. I wanted to discover how far I was capable of going.
And I did not have to wait long for another opportunity to find out.
About two months later came my second fight, this time in Las Vegas, against Damon Jackson. The preparation was not perfect either.
During that camp, I suffered a serious leg injury that kept me from training normally. I could not run, and there were many days when we had to adapt the sessions. I even did pad work—the drills where a coach catches your punches on padded mitts—while sitting down.
But I had already learned something: waiting for everything to be perfect is a very good way to never do anything.
So we did what we could with what we had. I went into the fight with that injury, stepped into the Octagon, and won by knockout in the first round.
Then came another fight; then another, and another. Each victory brought me a little closer to something that, for many years, had existed only inside my head: becoming world champion.
Finally, February 17 arrived.
It is difficult for me to explain what that day meant. It was the day I had dreamed about for years; the day I had trained for when no one knew who I was, the day I had imagined while working to pay for my competitions, the day I had visualized before I was even in the UFC.
That night, I was going to fight Alexander Volkanovski for the world championship.
He was not simply another opponent. He was the champion: a man who had dominated the division for years and had never lost a fight at featherweight in the UFC. And I was going to try to take his belt.
I remember waking up that morning and walking over to the window. I looked outside: cars were passing, people were walking, everyone going about their lives. It made me smile to think that, for almost everyone, this was a completely ordinary day.
But not for me. For me, it was the day I could fulfill the dream I had chased for most of my life.
It made me think about something: life does not stop because you are about to live the most important moment of yours. The world keeps moving, the cars keep passing, people keep walking. You are the one who has to learn to be present when your moment arrives.
The hours passed, and it was time to go to the arena. The closer the fight came, the more you could feel the tension.
There is a part of fighting that I believe only someone who has walked toward a place knowing that, when he gets there, another person will try to hurt him can truly understand. There is fear. There are nerves and uncertainty. And none of that disappears because you are a professional, or even because you are confident.
Courage is not the absence of fear. It is refusing to let fear make your decisions for you.
Then it was time to walk toward the Octagon. I remember looking around: the lights, the arena, the people, the noise, my team walking beside me. In the middle of all that tension, I had a thought that completely changed the way I was experiencing the moment.
I had dreamed of this. I had prayed for it and worked for years to be exactly where I was. And I thought, “How can I ask God for something for so many years and then, when He finally places it in front of me, be too worried to enjoy it?”
I could not be that ungrateful. I had asked for this moment. Now I had to live it.
So I decided to enjoy it: the fear, the nerves, the noise, that walk toward the Octagon. Because even the tension was part of the dream.
Hours later, everything that had existed in my imagination for so many years became real. I won by knockout. I became world champion.
I had reached the summit of that mountain, and for much of my life I had believed that when I got there, I would feel something like permanent happiness.
When you are a child, you imagine that is how it works. You think that one day you will have the things you want—the belt, the money, the house, the cars, the freedom, the recognition—and then something inside you will say, “That’s it. I did it. Now I’m happy.”
But the morning after I became world champion, I opened my eyes and discovered something I had not expected. The first question that came into my mind was very simple:
“What now?”
I had spent so many years chasing that moment that I had never thought very much about what existed beyond it. I felt something like an emptiness—not because I was ungrateful, or because winning the championship did not mean an enormous amount to me, but because I discovered that no result, however great, can fill you forever.
I had reached the top of the mountain, and from there I could see another mountain.
I understood that this would probably stay with me for the rest of my life. There would always be another goal, another challenge, something else to learn; another version of myself to try to reach.
Later, I defended the title against Max Holloway in Abu Dhabi. It was another enormous challenge: I was facing someone who had spent years among the best in the world and had never been knocked out.
I knocked him out. I won again and lived another extraordinary night. Then the same question returned: “What now?”
So I decided to move up a division. I vacated my featherweight championship and went looking for a new challenge at lightweight. I faced Charles Oliveira, won by first-round knockout, and became a world champion in two divisions.
Another dream. Another mountain. Another conquest.
And once again I understood the same thing: there is no mountain whose summit can make you happy forever.
For years, I thought my happiness was waiting for me somewhere in the future: when I reached the UFC, when I had money, when I became champion, when I defended the belt, when I won another championship… Always when.
Until I understood that if you keep living that way, your whole life can pass while you wait to start living. The greatest conquest taught me, precisely, to stop living only for the next one.
I learned to enjoy the journey, because everything passes: the good moments and the bad, the fear, the pressure, victory and defeat. One day you are walking toward the Octagon with thousands of people screaming; another, you are sitting alone in silence with yourself.
Nothing stays exactly the same. And that does not have to be sad. On the contrary, it is precisely what makes every moment valuable.
I still have enormous dreams today. I am still hungry, still determined to conquer things I have not yet achieved. I never want to lose that part of myself. But I do not want to hand my happiness over to things that do not yet exist either.
Because I learned that the future will always find another mountain. Life, however, happens in only one place: here, now.
And maybe that was the real conquest: not becoming world champion, but learning to be present enough to enjoy it when it happened.
Chapter 7 — The Fall
For many years, I knew one feeling: winning. I had fought eighteen professional fights; seventeen nights ended the way I wanted, and one did not. For the first time in my professional career, I had lost. That night I also discovered a side of the sport I had never experienced before: both orbital bones fractured, my septum broken, and my foot broken.
I remember waking up and looking at myself in the mirror. For a few seconds, I did not recognize the face staring back at me. I thought, “This can’t be. This can’t be me.” It was difficult to hold my own gaze, but something happened that may sound strange from the outside: as I looked at myself, I felt more respect for myself. I could even say I loved myself a little more.
I knew something better than anyone: I had given everything. I had arrived prepared, and I felt good physically, mentally, and spiritually. I did not need to search for an excuse. I had tried, and that night it had not worked out. That was all. I discovered that I could live with it, because when you know deep inside that you gave everything, the result hurts, but it does not destroy you.
I did not want to go back, erase that night, or change my story. I believe in God’s will. I have always said that if God ever ruins my plans, perhaps it is because those plans could have ruined me. It was very easy to repeat that when everything was going well. Now I had to live it. And I accepted it.
Maybe that, too, was meant to be part of my story. Maybe I needed that experience to discover a version of myself I had not yet met. I had won seventeen times and one night went wrong, but one night cannot erase a life.
Chapter 8 — The Mirror
Then the noise disappeared. There was no fight anymore, no crowd, no opponent. There was me. And the uncomfortable questions began: Who am I after losing? Do I still believe the things I said when I was winning? Did my confidence really depend on a record? Do I love this only when it gives me victories? Do I want to come back?
Something happened that I did not expect: defeat did not extinguish the fire. It made it bigger. I wanted more than ever to train, to return, and to do things right. I had hit the ground, but hitting the ground does not mean you have to stay there. You can also use it to push yourself back up.
I understood that I would feel truly defeated the day I lost my love for what I do, the excitement, or that motivation that had been with me since I was a child. Then I would have a problem. But that had not happened. Exactly the opposite had happened: I still wanted to come back.
I could not even fully explain why. Love? Ego? Money? Competition? I do not know. I am still discovering it. And I like being able to admit that, because some questions do not need an immediate answer.
I know only one thing: I do not want twenty years to pass and then look back and think I should have risked more. I would rather live with the consequences of having tried than with the question of what might have happened if I had had the courage to do it.
For years I had spoken about faith, character, accepting God’s will, getting back up and continuing. Now I had the chance to find out whether I truly believed any of it. Because what matters is not what you know, but what you do with what you know. And what I knew helped me.
I looked in the mirror and could respect the man standing in front of me. To me, that is worth more than any perfect record: the outcome defines one night; character defines a lifetime.
Chapter 9 — The Return
I do not want to come back to erase a defeat. I cannot erase it, and I do not want to. It is part of me. I want to return because I still want to discover how far I can go, because the fire is still there, because I still love the path, and because now I return with something I did not have before: the experience of having fallen.
I want anyone who sees me return to understand something that is not only about martial arts: you can fall into a hole, but a hole is not a grave. Your last result does not define who you are.
You can lose a fight or a business. You can make mistakes, fail while trying to build something you love, or go through a time when you do not even recognize the person in the mirror. But as long as you still have the power to decide what you do next, the story is not over.
If I had an eighteen-year-old kid in front of me who had just failed at the thing he wanted most, I would not tell him he was a loser. I would tell him the exact opposite: “You’re trying. You’re already doing something that so many people will never dare to do. Now learn, look at your mistakes, ask yourself the uncomfortable questions, get better, and try again.”
I do not want anyone to see me as a man who never falls, because that would be a lie. I want them to see a man who can be knocked to the ground and who keeps making the same decision: to get back up.
I do not know what my next fight will look like, and I cannot promise any result. But I can promise something that depends entirely on me: you will not see me stop trying.
Epilogue — What Remains
When I was a child, I thought “being somebody” meant achieving things. Then I thought it meant winning. Later came the belts, the recognition, and many of the things that boy had imagined. Today, I see it differently.
One day there will be no more fights and no more belts; one day the lights will go out. Then a far more important question will remain: Who was I while all of it was happening?
I cannot completely control how people will remember me, and I do not want to live trying to control what others think of me. People change. I am not exactly the same man I was two months ago, and I hope that ten years from now I will not be exactly the man I am today. I want to keep learning, surprising myself, and growing.
But there is something I do want to preserve. When I look in the mirror, I want to respect the man I see; to know that I was a good son, a good father, a good brother and friend; that I took care of my people and lived by my values; that when I was afraid, I moved forward; when I won, I was grateful; when I lost, I learned; and when life knocked me to the ground, I never allowed the ground to decide where my story ended.
After everything I have lived through, I have understood something: they can take away a victory or a belt; they can change a result, people’s opinion of you, almost anything. But there is one victory no one can ever take from you: character.
I have been down. I have looked at myself in the mirror. And I am still here: with more experience, more clarity, more fire, and the same decision that boy made so many years ago.
Keep moving forward.
Translation and adaptation based on the original Spanish text.
Copyright 2026. Ilia Topuria. All rights reserved©.
