How Ilia Topuria Became the Greatest Puncher in MMA
Examining the skills and setups that went into knocking out all your favorite fighters.
When Jack Dempsey was sparking out bigger men at the height of his boxing career, he fancied himself a natural puncher. A man fortunate enough to have been bestowed by fate gifts in the art of smashing up faces and separating heavyweights from consciousness. But in his retirement, he started reverse engineering his mechanics to teach them to others, and found that his thought process changed. Thinking through each step reminded Dempsey just how much expertise and labor went into constructing the puncher he became, and he came to see the art of punching as something that is taught rather than a quality inherent to a fighter.
Outliers who push the edge of the spectrum certainly make it hard to deny that power can be a gift. Every so often, a fighter comes along who seems to strike with the fist of god himself, capable of otherwise impossible feats of brain damage. What else could possibly explain Melvin Manhoef, a natural Middleweight who needed only 18 seconds to topple Mark Hunt’s legendary chin - a chin that made it through the early 2000s K-1 Heavyweight gauntlet without ever losing consciousness, surviving clean head kicks from fighters like Mirko Cro Cop along the way.
No amount of training and instruction can turn someone into a Manhoef-like puncher, but neither was Manhoef slumping elite fighters night after night. Freakish power does not bring along with it a freakish ability to apply that power. The science behind delivering power can be learned and improved by anyone, but an elite athlete who becomes a student of the game separates himself both from those who rely on their natural gifts and those without any.
Ilia Topuria is a phenomenal athlete, but he was not simply bestowed with the touch of death and marked by destiny to wilt everything in his path. The biggest punching threat in MMA, the one most likely to fell his opponents because he will both find their chin and find it hard, is something Topuria learned to be. Even in early fights, it’s clear that Topuria and his trainers invested a great deal in developing mechanics that allow him to transfer enormous amounts of weight into thunderous blows without losing his balance, the subtlety to put fist straight to jaw, and the timing to create collisions at the perfect moment. Topuria is what boxing historian, Kyle McLachlan, would call a composite puncher - one whose mechanical and tactical nous is integral to his ability to wallop, in the vein of Sugar Ray Robinson or Joe Louis.
Now that Topuria just secured his fastest career knockout over one of his toughest competitors in Charles Oliveira, let’s look back at his path of devastation and examine the skills and subtlety that left some of the greatest fighters to ever compete lying in broken heaps beneath him.