Miocic, who continues to work full-time as a fireman, now faces scrutiny regarding his preparation from Dominick Cruz.
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The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) has recently confirmed the official arrangement for the upcoming Heavyweight title showdown. Stipe Miocic, making his highly anticipated return, aims to secure a historic third championship by challenging the newly crowned titleholder and legendary mixed martial arts (MMA) figure, Jon Jones.
The epic clash is scheduled to take place at UFC 295 in New York City on November 11, 2023. Since his defeat to Francis Ngannou in their March 2021 rematch, Stipe Miocic has been absent from the Octagon. Speculation about a potential fight against Jon Jones had been circulating, but it wasn’t until late 2022 that the talks gained traction.
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Miocic, who continues to work full-time as a fireman, now faces scrutiny regarding his preparation from former multiple-time UFC champion Dominick Cruz.
“Am I the only one who doesn’t know how much Stipe’s been training?” Cruz asked on ESPN’s UFC 290 post-fight show. “Have we been seeing videos of him training a lot? Where’s he been? Is he doing martial arts against trees? Because he’s facing a giant, giant man that can fight and it’s not a fire. I’m just wondering. You’re not fighting a fire, you’re fighting Jon Jones. Have you been fighting humans in the woods? I’m just trying to understand what you’re doing to prepare.”
“He was training a lot consistently and fighting a lot consistently,” he concluded. “What has he been doing now? Fighting fires, right? I’m just curious.”
Dominick Cruz is familiar with the challenge of returning from extended periods of inactivity to regain world titles, as he demonstrated in January 2016 after enduring a series of debilitating lower body injuries that kept him sidelined for nearly four years.
In the case of 40-year-old Stipe Miocic, he finds himself in a situation where he is older than Cruz was when Cruz reclaimed the Bantamweight title against T.J. Dillashaw. Additionally, Miocic, who has enjoyed a 13-year career, had never gone a full year without stepping into the octagon until 2022.
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