UFC 279 Backstage Brawl! Pro Fighters Start a Riot!

With the fights right around the corner and the event already kicked off, Khamzat Chimaev gets into an argument with Kevin Holland and both fighters start an all out brawl. Shortly after they are joined by Nate and his entire crew. With a total number of around 80 people engaged in the riot.

Dana Cancels UFC 279 Pre-Fight Press Conference

Here’s what Dana White had to say

“The Diaz camp showed up with 57 people,” White explained. “Khamzat’s team had 30-something people. Then you had multiple guys going on back here. It was crazy. It was absolutely nuts back here… You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out where this whole press conference was headed.”

“White later revealed four of the six fighters due to speak at the press conference were involved. “All hell broke loose,” he said after the incident. “We stopped it, but we didn’t do a good job of not letting it happen.

“Yeah [it was Khamzat Chimaev and Kevin Holland that started it]. There were multiple things going on at the same time. It wasn’t just one thing that erupted and it happened. There were multiple things going on at the same time.

“So there was security over there, there was no security over there. There was no security over there cause everybody was dealing with the other thing and once it all started erupting, it was just a complete s*** show.”

“This is what we do,” he added. “This is the business that we’re in. Thiss is the fight business. These things happen. What we’ll do is we look at how this happened today, why were we unprepared for this, why we were not able to manage this backstage better than we did, and we’ll be better next time.

“When you know that you have guys that don’t like each other, you make sure that they’re isolated, you have plenty of security around. You know how Nate and Khamzat are, they could have some words and we have enough people here to deal with it.

“What we didn’t have enough people for was everybody to start fighting. When everybody starts fighting and there was more than just fighting going on that security was dealing with. We weren’t prepared.”

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Other Backstage moments

Meanwhile, Tony Ferguson took the stage while Dana white was backstage dealing with the chaos.

Meanwhile Darren Till was also caught speaking to Kevin Holland and trying to de-escalate the situation with Kevin Holland:

Khamzat Chimaev:

Had this to say after the altercation;

Twitter reactions:

Kevin Holland

Ariel Helwani

Darren Till