Las Vegas — Russian middleweight Roman Kopylov was as shocked as anyone when UFC Vegas 101 opponent Chris Curtis accused him of sending spies to scope out his opponent’s training camp.
“I was quite surprised. These are not the type of things that I’m usually associated with, so I wasn’t sure where it was coming from,” Kopylov (13-3) told media outlets including Cageside Press during this week’s UFC Vegas 101 media day. Luckily, Curtis himself later realized that he’d made a mistake, retracting the accusation. Curtis also did the right thing.
“Afterwards I saw Chris in the locker room, we were training, and he came up to me. He was apologizing, he said ‘you know what, I was wrong, I was mistaken.’ He actually put something out on Instagram since then, so it’s gone now.”
As it turned out, a couple of Russian fighters cornering Bogdan Guskov shortly had come to town, and wound up taking a photo with Kopylov, leading to the misunderstanding. That’s about as much drama as we’ve seen involving Kopylov, who seems to do most of his talking in the cage.
The hoopla certainly hasn’t hurt the profile of the bout, however. And Kopylov doesn’t appear to have been distracted, instead focusing on the task at hand and making sure he’s done his homework.
“I’ve seen a lot of tape on him, it seems as though he’s usually pretty much in the same, he’s got the same plan. He usually works standing up, he’s fighting out of his stance, he’s a good striker. I think that it’ll be a pretty fun fight. He doesn’t really wrestle, I don’t really wrestle, we’re two strikers and we’re expecting a show a good fight.”
Kopylov was also asked on Wednesday about César Almeida, a man he defeated in his last bout, being placed ahead of him on the UFC Vegas 101 card. Apparently, it doesn’t bother him as much as you might think (and to be fair, Almeida has fought and won once since).
“To be honest not so much,” said Kopylov. “As long as he doesn’t get the Fight of the Night, I’m cool.”
Watch the full UFC Vegas 101 media day appearance by Roman Kopylov above.
