Dricus Du Plessis: ‘I Hate Being A Loser’

Dricus Du Plessis prepares to face Khamzat Chimaev in the UFC middleweight championship fight during the UFC 319 event at the United Center on August 16, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Ed Mulholland/Zuffa LLC)

Former Middleweight Champ Stoked To Finally Return To Action

By E. Spencer Kyte • Jul. 16, 2026

Dricus Du Plessis isn’t particularly familiar with losing, having faltered just three times during his 26-fight career, each setback followed by an increasingly larger run of success than the last.

But for the first time in a dozen fights, the 32-year-old South African saunters into battle off a loss, having dropped the UFC middleweight title to Khamzat Chimaev in a lopsided battle at UFC 319 last summer in Chicago. After a longer-than-anticipated stay on the sidelines, the former champion is set to return to action against former welterweight ruler Kamaru Usman in the main event of the UFC’s return to Oklahoma City on Saturday night.

“Obviously, I was devastated, it was horrible; losing my belt, losing in general, I’m not good with that,” Du Plessis said. “We had some time to lick our wounds, but this is the fight game: it’s how you come back. That’s the past now, and I’m very excited to be back, and that’s the only focus right now.”

People will hear that answer and pawn it off as a cliché or derisively ask, “What else was he going to say?” but the honest truth is that there are plenty of vanquished former champions who haven’t and wouldn’t shift their focus as quickly as Du Plessis has here. Sure, his response sounds straight out of a book title, “So You’ve Lost Your Title; Now What?” but that doesn’t mean it’s any less true for the standout talent, who remains in the thick of the title chase in the ever-changing 185-pound weight class.

Dricus Du Plessis lands a spinning backfist against Sean Strickland in the UFC middleweight championship fight during the UFC 312 event at Qudos Bank Arena on February 09, 2025 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC)

After the initial frustration wore off, Du Plessis and his team reconvened to dissect what went wrong and begin figuring out a path forward, a process that called for rigorous honesty and both collective and individual accountability up and down the line.

“Me and my whole team sat down with each other to say, ‘What did I do wrong? What is my fault?’ and treated it like it was 100-percent my fault, which it was,” began Du Plessis. “My head coach was treating it like it was 100 percent his fault, and my grappling coach treating it like it was 100 percent his fault.

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“That is what makes a team great is looking and saying what I think I should have done different, and then we get together and we say, ‘What did we do wrong? What went wrong?’ and being 100-percent honest and taking full responsibility for what happened. No excuse is gonna help, and you’re not just saying, ‘It was a tough night at the office; it was a bad night.’

“No, it wasn’t — I felt great; everything was great,” he added. “I got beaten fair and square, and we needed to figure out what that was (that went wrong), and we did. We said, ‘This is what went wrong, and this is how we stop it from happening again.’”

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For Du Plessis, the process is about more than just diagnosing the issues from the previous fight and trying to find a path back towards the middleweight title; he has greater ambitions than simply carrying UFC gold for a second time, and to that end, the always candid standout is happy that this loss occurred when it did.

“The blessing in this is — my goal is to be the greatest martial artist ever, being seen as the greatest fighter to ever walk this Earth, and you can’t have a hole in your game if you want to be that,” Du Plessis said. “Rather now than later. Now I know about this, and it was exposed, and I’m glad it was because now I get to fix it.”

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More importantly, now he gets to return to action and show everyone the fruits of his efforts since the last time they saw him, and he’s doing so in a manner that he believes suits him best.

Originally, Du Plessis wasn’t planning on staying out of the Octagon for this long: he returned to the gym a couple of weeks after the fight with Chimaev and slowly started working into a rhythm day by day, allowing his body time to recover and small, lingering injuries to heal before starting to get back into the everyday cycle of things.

He went to Thailand in January to really get things rolling and was supposed to compete in April before an injury forced him to press pause. What he anticipated would be a couple of weeks on the shelf turned into a little more downtime and allowed him to further reflect on the importance of listening to his body and being selective with his activity.

Dricus Du Plessis kicks Israel Adesanya in the UFC middleweight championship fight during the UFC 305 event at RAC Arena on August 18, 2024 in Perth, Australia. (Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC)

“Everything works out the way that it should,” began Du Plessis. “It’s not ideal to be out of the Octagon for this long, but I've been very active over the past couple of years. I’m very happy with the activity level, and here we are.

“It’s not about just getting in fights — it’s about fighting the right guys, making the fights count,” Du Plessis said. “It’s not just about getting as many fights as you possibly can, though I see a lot of guys do that. If you look at guys and see a guy like (Israel) Adesanya, for example, (who said), ‘I fought three times a year, every year.’ Good for you — it’s amazing, but then you break.

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“He said it himself, ‘Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing.’ Yeah, fight three times a year — I did that myself, fighting three times in a 12-month span, but then sometimes go, ‘I did that, maybe this year, let’s do two times.’”

And with this first fight of 2026, he’s adhering to the other part of that two-piece combo, stepping in with Usman.

Saturday marks the Usman’s first bout in a full-on move to middleweight after freelancing in the division on short notice against Chimaev at UFC 294, where he pushed the dominating wrestler to the end before ultimately landing on the wrong side of a majority decision verdict. He returned to welterweight last year, halting a three-fight skid with a decision win over Joaquin Buckley, but now, he has his sights set on making a run at a second title, while Du Plessis is focused on showing folks what his latest version looks like in action.

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“Everybody is keen to see what the 2.0 ‘Stillknocks’ is looking like, and I’m keen to see — well, I know what it’s gonna look like; I’m just keen to go and show it off,” he said. “Dancing under bright lights? I love it. Being in the gym, training, getting better every day? I love it, I love this sport, but man, that itch to walk, to be under the lights, to be a gladiator? That’s what I was born to do.

“Whether they are cheering, they are booing, I don’t mind; I just need to be there, facing another man and fighting until one of us gives up. That is what I was born to do and what I love to do.

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“Then doing it against a legend like Kamaru Usman, who is deserving of all the flowers that he’s ever gotten?” he said. “I have the world’s respect for him and what he has done in this sport.”

While the excitement to return has been at a high for some time now, there was an eyebrow-raising moment that added a little more intrigue to his return earlier this year when Chimaev was dethroned by former champ Sean Strickland at UFC 328 in May. Positioned in the crowd at Prudential Center in Newark, Du Plessis admitted that he couldn’t help but smile when he heard Bruce Buffer shout “And NEW!” that evening.

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That said, he’s not going to call for a third fight with Strickland just quite yet.

“You can’t help but go, ‘Well, I’ve got that puzzle figured out,’ but then, of course, you look at the press conference, and I’ve got to respect that,” Du Plessis said. “Strickland goes, ‘Dricus has been inactive; I’m not fighting him in my first defense,’ and I can respect that. You deserve one title defense at least because the previous time it didn’t work out.

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“I have a lot of respect for Strickland — he’s a cool dude; he’s an absolute warrior in the Octagon — so I’ll grant him that one defense before he has to face me.”

While getting reacquainted with Strickland is definitely on his agenda, Du Plessis is more focused on the task at hand this weekend and using his return to action against Usman to remind people that he’s still an absolute force in the middleweight division.

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“Firstly, just winning; that is very important,” he said. “But winning in the way — if the fight is being fought, I don’t have a boring fight in me if we’re fighting, if we’re not trying to hold each other. Right now, I’ve figured out that not to be in that situation is my responsibility, and man, I know performance-wise I will be (locked in), and it’s about doing whatever it takes to get that victory.

“You’re as good as your last fight, and right now, I’m a loser, and I hate being a loser,” he added. “I’m going out there not just to get that win, but to do it in a way that people say, ‘Holy s***! This man is the best in the world.’”