Khabib Nurmagomedov Became the Elder When He Stopped Fighting – So He Did What His Father Would’ve Done
When Khabib Nurmagomedov stepped away from fighting in October 2020, following his father Abdulmanap’s death just three months earlier, he wasn’t walking into a quiet retirement. He was walking into a team that suddenly needed someone to lead it. That someone 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 have to take leadership. Who’s gonna take over? You cannot just leave them alone. I have to keep continuing 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 gym. Islam Makhachev, his cousin Umar, fellow fighter Usman, all younger, all looking to him now. The approach he brought wasn’t tentative. When Khabib coaches, there’s no debate. “There is no freedom of speech. Everybody do what I say. There is no 50/50,” he said, describing his coaching style. “If I say in or out, there is no 50/50.”
Islam Makhachev, now the UFC lightweight champion, describes training camps under Khabib as relentlessly demanding but never arbitrary. Twelve rounds on the bags, a 30-minute run, then sparring the next morning. “If you want to be champion, you have to follow the way champs did,” Makhachev said. “He knows how it works.”
The irony is Khabib openly admits coaching is harder than fighting. “I didn’t know it would be so hard… This coaching life is completely different from fighting life. I can only talk. I can’t do anything. I can only give my brothers advice and stay outside the cage. This is not what I’ve done all my life. This is why it’s a little bit of a headache for me.”
