Paulo Costa plans to call out 'motherf*cker' Khamzat Chimaev with UFC 318 win
Costa (14-4 MMA, 6-4 UFC) and Chimaev (14-0 MMA, 8-0 UFC) were booked to fight at UFC 294 in October 2023, but Costa wound up withdrawing due to injury. Their rivalry dates back to a heated run-in at the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas prior to Chimaev's UFC 279 win over Kevin Holland in September 2022.
Costa meets Roman Kopylov (14-3 MMA, 6-3 UFC) in Saturday's co-main event (pay-per-view, ESPN, ESPN+) at Smoothie King Center in New Orleans. With a win, "Borrachinha" hopes he can finally settle his score with Chimaev, who challenges middleweight champion Dricus Du Plessis in the UFC 319 headliner on Aug. 16 in Chicago.
"If God gives me this victory, I will call his name," Costa said on "The Ariel Helwani Show." "I'm going to call this son of a b*tch, motherf*cker for a fight. He needs to fight me. I need to fight him. I have tried to fight him for a long time, since we had a beef inside the PI.
"He has been avoiding fighting me for a long time. He always says no, and UFC has tried to put this matchup together for a long time, like two years ago. They said Chimaev said no, 'he doesn't want to fight you, he wants to fight anybody at 185, but he doesn't want to fight you.'"
Since falling short to Israel Adesanya in their title fight at UFC 253, Costa has failed to regain his peak form, losing four of his past five fights. He plans on bringing back the version of himself that went toe-to-toe with Yoel Romero in a Fight of the Night win.
"I just feel like I need a new refresh," Costa said. "See different things and be connected with my old style, that style to chase, to be more aggressive, to bring back the Paulo of the old days since I fought my very first fights in the UFC, very aggressive. The fans and people around me always ask me to come back with this kind of style of fighting. So, yeah, I was looking for that, to bring back this style, and I think this is who I am."
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