Daniel Cormier condemns teammate Usman Nurmagomedov for bloodying Merab Dvalishvili in unprovoked attack

Daniel Cormier publicly condemned his longtime training partner Usman Nurmagomedov on Wednesday after Nurmagomedov and a group of associates attacked Merab Dvalishvili ahead of the RAF Abu Dhabi event, leaving Dvalishvili bloodied in a brawl that drew widespread backlash across the MMA community.

Cormier, who trains alongside Nurmagomedov through the Team Nurmagomedov and American Kickboxing Academy connection, made clear that their friendship offered no cover for what he witnessed. “Today, I saw dangerous actions,” Cormier said on his YouTube channel. “I saw Usman Nurmagomedov and a group of guys jump Merab Dvalishvili. Watching that visual was actually very sad, because I know Usman; I know Merab. I know that there’s a lot of bad blood between these two camps. I also know that it should never lead to behavior like we saw today.”

The roots of the feud run through Usman’s younger brother, UFC bantamweight Umar Nurmagomedov, whose rivalry with Dvalishvili has grown increasingly bitter. The tension escalated in July when Dvalishvili slapped one of Umar’s associates at the RAF Georgia event. Islam Makhachev, a teammate of the Nurmagomedov family, pointed to that incident as the trigger for Wednesday’s attack — an explanation Cormier rejected outright.

“One bad action should not lead to another bad action, because now both of these guys lose in this situation,” Cormier said. “Merab was there to wrestle in RAF; now he’s probably not going to get to compete. Usman is a free agent — this thing will stick with him for as long as his career goes now. There is no winning in this situation.”

Cormier drew on his own history of heated rivalries — including a confrontation with Jon Jones in the lobby of the MGM Grand — to acknowledge that emotions can push fighters toward poor decisions, while insisting Wednesday’s incident crossed a clear line. “Emotions run high in rivalries. At times, I was guilty of bad behavior. But today was really bad, and it should never happen. We as fighters should not fear or worry about our safety whenever we go to places to do other things.”

Invoking the 2018 bus attack in which Conor McGregor targeted Khabib Nurmagomedov’s team, Cormier argued that personal trash talk between Umar and Dvalishvili had inflamed the situation to a dangerous degree, but that no provocation justified the outcome. “The trash talk has become so personal, but at the end of the day, it cannot look like that, because you have to imagine that there is going to be some sort of consequence — you cannot live a life with no consequence.”

Usman Nurmagomedov, currently a free agent after his time in Bellator, now faces potential legal and professional repercussions from the incident.