Georges St-Pierre believes he’d have had as good a chance as anyone to defeat Khabib Nurmagomedov.
It’s feat that no fighter was able to claim during Nurmagomedov’s 12-year career as “The Eagle” went 28-0 on the way to winning and thrice defending the UFC lightweight title. St-Pierre—a long-reigning UFC welterweight champion who also briefly held the promotion’s middleweight belt—has long been a dream opponent for Nurmagomedov, but the stars never quite aligned for the two to square off.
That hasn’t stopped St-Pierre from being asked about how a fight with Nurmagomedov would go, and on a recent episode of Henry Cejudo and Kamaru Usman’s Pound 4 Pound podcast, “GSP” expressed confidence that he could hand Nurmagomedov a loss.
“I think Khabib could have beat me, I’m not saying I could have beat Khabib all the time,” St-Pierre said. “I was confident enough to take that fight that I was thinking that if I take that fight I’m going to beat him that day at that particular place, that doesn’t mean I will beat him all the time. But I was confident, maybe I’m wrong.
“I think I would have beat him because if he would have come to put pressure on me, I would have put him down. I would have had the confidence to try to go for it.”
St-Pierre is neck-and-neck with Nurmagomedov when it comes to “greatest of all time” talk. The French-Canadian star lost just twice in his career, successfully defending the UFC welterweight title nine consecutive times against some of the biggest names of his generation and then returning from a four-year hiatus to add a middleweight title to his collection in 2017.
Like Nurmagomedov, St-Pierre became known for his suffocating and punishing grappling offense. It’s in how their wrestling tactics differ that St-Pierre sees an opening to press the advantage in their hypothetical matchup.
“Khabib, he’s got a very good overhand right,” St-Pierre said. “He’s very good at measuring distance and at creating a dilemma in the mind of his opponent between a takedown and an overhand right. He’s very, very good, he’s at his most dangerous when he puts you with your back against the fence because he’s a master at chain wrestling. My style is different. My style is more in the middle. I’m very good at using fakes and creating distraction to get at your legs. I’m more that dynamic guy, I call it proactive and reactive takedowns from the center. But Khabib is better when he’s got his opponent, his back against the fence.
“So my strategy if I would have gone against Khabib would have been to keep the fight as much as I can in the middle and not be afraid to go to take him down. I think that I would have maybe been the first guy that he fought or one of the only guys that would have tried to put him down, and I’ve put down everybody that I’ve fought.”
For St-Pierre, the key to beating Nurmagomedov is to be pushing forward and staying offensive, a tactic that’s likely much easier on paper given some of the luminaries that Nurmagomedov has neutralized including Conor McGregor, Justin Gaethje, and Dustin Poirier.
It’s fighters like Gaethje that St-Pierre feels could have upset Nurmagomedov if their approach had been different.
“I think most guys that fought Khabib were afraid of Khabib’s takedowns, so they were fighting on their heels and they were getting backed up to the wall,” St-Pierre said. “Three guys that fought Khabib did very well: Gleison Tibau, very, very close fight, if you watch that fight it’s very, very close; Michael Johnson was my training partner… If you watch the early minute of the fight, he’s doing a fantastic job until he lost his confidence because Michael Johnson is incredibly gifted, very, very talented, but when things start not going his way, the floodgate opens. I think that’s one of the mistakes he did and if he would have started the second round as good as he did in the first he would have had a better performance.
“Another guy who did well is Gaethje, Gaethje in the beginning did very well. Kick, punch, he did very well until similar story, things start to not go well and then everything falls apart.”
Most recently, St-Pierre shot down the possibility that he could have had a grappling match with Nurmagomedov last December, noting that Nurmagomedov was not on a list of opponents offered to him. St-Pierre did not end up competing on the Dec. 14 UFC Fight Pass Invitational card.
An MMA fight is well out of the realm of possibility now given that both fighters appear to be happily retired, but there was a time when it made all the sense in the world to St-Pierre.
“You have to always think of what you can gain and what you can lose,” St-Pierre said. “It would be a fight that everybody at the time wanted because Khabib had a perfect career. Nobody ever beat him and he retired on top. At the time, that was the fight that everybody wanted to see. So if it would be a time that I would have made a comeback for one fight, right after I retired, it was that time.
“But I always told myself—now I’m 42 years old—when I hit the four-zero, it’s finished, there’s nothing that can make me come back. It’s finished. So I was about 38, 39 when that happened. Even his own people told me, some of the people told me, ‘Hey, I think he’s going to ask for you.’ Then when he retired, I think everybody got surprised.”
