UFC lightweight champion Ilia Topuria recently opened up about one of the most personal challenges of his life during a recent interview. During the conversation, Topuria reflected on going through a divorce, describing the experience as something that reshaped him almost instantly.
“It’s strange, it’s strange because the truth is it changed me from one day to the next,” he said. “You’re not aware of things until they happen to you.”
The 27-year-old Georgian-Spanish champion spoke about how the end of his marriage affected his daily life, particularly as a father. The hardest part, he explained, was adjusting to a new normal after years of routine with his children.
“You get used to waking up in the morning with your kids, seeing them, and suddenly all of that changes,” he said. “It’s hard.”
But rather than letting the situation pull him under, Topuria leaned into what he described as a conscious choice in how to process pain. He acknowledged that there are always two ways to face difficult circumstances, and he deliberately chose the one that kept him moving forward.
“I have two ways of living it, right? I still have to live through it. I can live it from the negative, or simply by accepting my reality and pushing forward, which is the only thing I have left, and the best way out a person can have,” he said. “You can’t fall apart in a situation like that, because anyone who has lived through it knows how hard it is.”
Even in that honesty, he was clear about the mindset that kept him grounded.
“Those who know me know that I’m a person who, when something is out of my control, I don’t live from the negative. I don’t live it cursing everything, asking why it happened to me.”
When asked what he took away from the entire experience, Topuria smiled and offered an answer nobody expected from a world champion.
“You might find it funny,” he said, “but what I’ve learned the most is to listen to my mother.”
In his view, mothers carry a kind of instinct that operates on a frequency their children simply cannot access, no matter how certain those children feel about their own choices.
“Mothers have an intuition and they see something that we don’t see,” he said. “When a mother tells you that’s not the way, no matter how clearly you see it as right, it’s not.”
He recalled his own mother warning him, in that quiet but firm way only a parent can, that the path he was on wasn’t the right one. At the time, like most people convinced of their own certainty, he didn’t listen.
“I remember my mother, on very few things in my life, telling me: ‘That’s not the way.’ I have learned to listen to my mother,” he said, before closing with a simple and genuine message directed at her: “I love you, Mom.”
