Born in Chechnya in 1994, Chimaev moved to Sweden as a teenager and built his base in freestyle wrestling before turning to MMA. He went pro in 2018 and reached the UFC two years later, debuting in 2020 with a 17-second knockout of Gerald Meerschaert. A near-fatal bout of COVID-19 that same year almost ended his career and left him with recurring health problems that have held him to a handful of fights per cycle. Travel restrictions tied to his relationship with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who attended his wedding, kept him out of the United States from late 2022 until mid-2025, per MMA Mania, pushing his fights with Kamaru Usman and Robert Whittaker to Abu Dhabi.
In the cage, Chimaev is takedowns, top pressure, and front headlock attacks. He lands 4.01 significant strikes per minute at 74.92% accuracy — a number that high because he hits people from mount and side control, not at range. Takedown accuracy: 58.33%. Coach Alan “Finfou” Nascimento told Real MMA Today that the birth of Chimaev’s son in 2023 was the moment “Borz” learned to manage the aggression that once defined him, a shift you could see in how calm he looked before the Whittaker fight. Cardio past round one and the weight cut are still open questions.
The run that defines his career starts at UFC 273. He out-grappled Gilbert Burns over three rounds in April 2022 in what plenty of people called the welterweight fight of the year. He submitted Li Jingliang and Kevin Holland inside a round, moved up to middleweight, and beat Kamaru Usman by majority decision at UFC 294 in 2023. At UFC 308 in October 2024, he broke Whittaker’s jaw with a face-crank submission at 3:34 of round one. That got him the title shot. He controlled Du Plessis for five rounds in Chicago to win it.
The Strickland loss changes the picture. Chimaev struggled on the scale, faded after a dominant first round, and dropped a split decision in his only defense. He told Dana White afterward he wants to move up to 205, per MMA Fighting, which rules out an immediate rematch. He’s 32, with one loss and a body of work built on first-round violence. The question every grappler-led champion eventually has to answer is in front of him: does a new division reset him, or does it show the same limits?