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Ilia Topuria has been preparing his entire life for the fight he will face in Anaheim, Los Angeles, in the early morning hours of February 16-17. Opposing him will be Alexander Volkanovski (26-3-0), considered by many to be the best featherweight in UFC history.
But destiny is written, Ilia defends. And he will be the winner. He will write 15-0-0 on his record and raise the world championship belt to the Californian sky.
To get to the Honda Center, however, the Spanish-Georgian fighter has undergone an exhaustive preparation that has pushed him to the limit.
He spent several weeks in Las Vegas, Nevada, preparing for the fight. A very hard training camp that already began at his base in Alicante.
But in the hours leading up to the fight comes the hardest part: losing weight and making the cut at the weigh-in. And that's where one of his secrets comes in: wine.
"I drink a little more than a glass of wine. I drink half a liter of wine," he said a few days ago in El Partidazo de COPE. Something he had already confessed in 2023, when the figure of Topuria reached an unprecedented media boom in Spain.
"Thursdays are the most difficult nights for us wrestlers because during the day we can't eat or drink. We start with the sauna and in the morning we do workouts and from there the dehydration process starts. We have a hard time sleeping and for me, personally, drinking wine helps me sleep and at the same time helps me with dehydration. I have lost up to a kilo," explained the fighter in COPE.
Meanwhile, MARCA probed his entourage to try to find out which wine Topuria was drinking. But they do not want to give clues.
"It depends on the occasion, one brand or another... but always good," is the answer.
What they did confirm, though, was that the wine is always red.