UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou has blasted his former gym, the MMA Factory, for allegedly hiding videos of his sparring session with Ciryl Gane.
Ngannou will kick off the UFC’s pay-per-view calendar next year in a heavyweight title unification bout against former team-mate Gane.
A clip of Gane and the Cameroonian fighter sparring shows the top contender seemingly to get the better of ‘The Predator’ during training.
Two former teammates on a collision course.
Will we see Ciryl Gane and Francis Ngannou going at it for real in the Octagon? pic.twitter.com/3EUOQG7vHJ
— UFC on TNT Sports (@ufcontnt) June 28, 2021
Ngannou took to his YouTube channel to disclose that the sparring session transpired in January 2019. The 34-year-old star power claimed that they trained together for a month and that he’d bested Gane in sparring, except in the part shown in the video.
Ngannou stated:
“When I saw that footage, my first reaction was laughing. Because I know exactly what happened at those training sessions. But this is the thing. When they want to like, do some highlight, they always choose the part of the video that they use. And they have a lot of videos like that because, at the time, he was like, they were filming our training session to promote him, his fight, and everything. So, there was a lot of footage from those few training sessions. But a lot of them never came out and would never come out, will never come out. And I know for a fact that they will never come out.”
“It’s about to make him look better and make me look bad; to prove that he’s the man,” Ngannou added. “I really get intrigued by those stuff sometimes. And then how they just control people’s mind, conditioning them to think. And they just think like, suddenly they just shift from one way to other way of thinking. And I’m like, how easy is that to manipulate people, which, they’re really good at manipulation. But at the end of the day, as I said, we both know; everyone knows for a fact.”
Watch Francis Ngannou jibe at his former gym in the video below:
Ngannou is UFC’s first African-born heavyweight after he knocked out Stipe Miocic in Las Vegas in March this year.
