Ilia Topuria explains why he drinks ‘half a litre of wine’ on the eve of a UFC weigh-in

Hey, everyone does it differently we suppose. 

Ahead of his first-ever shot at UFC gold this weekend against reigning featherweight king Alexander Volkanovski, the undefeated Ilia Topuria has lifted the lid on one of the more novel techniques we’ve come across to shed the final few pounds ahead of stepping on the scales early on Friday — an it involved knocking back most of a bottle of wine.

Speaking to Michael Bisping on the former UFC champion’s podcast, as noted by MMA News, Topuria explained that imbibing some alcohol has become a pre-fight tradition for him in advance of the weigh-in, and even said that the dehydration he experiences from the drink helps him shed that last couple of pounds.

“So the thing is that when I drink half a litre of wine, and you know that on Thursday it’s a very hard night for every fighter because it’s a day before the weigh-ins,” he told Bisping.

“So it’s hard to sleep, it’s hard to rest, but I drink half a litre of wine,” he added. “I get very buzzed, very buzzed and I have very… such a great time with everyone.

“It’s like we change the atmosphere, you know? We don’t think about the fighting, we just celebrate, and I go to sleep like a baby. I wake up at the next morning with two pounds less, because of the dehydration, so everything plays out really well for me.”

However, this technique hasn’t always worked for fighters so close to a mixed martial arts bout. In 2021, Paulo Costa blamed wine he drank the night before his title bout against Israel Adesanya for hampering his performance.

“I was kind of drunk [when] I fought, maybe, on hangover,” he said, after translation, on his YouTube channel in the aftermath of the Adesanya fight. “I couldn’t sleep because of the [leg] cramps. Keep in mind that the fight happens at 9 a.m. [local time], we have to wake up at 5 to get ready, stretch, wrap the hands. The UFC told us to wake up at 5 in the morning to go to the arena to fight. I hadn’t slept until 2:30.

“It was my mistake and I don’t blame anyone else, it was something I chose [to do], but, in order to try to sleep, because I had to sleep since I was awake for 24 hours, I had wine, too much wine, a bottle [of wine] to try to black out. I had a glass and didn’t work. Two glasses, it didn’t work. Half bottle, didn’t work. I had it all.”