Chris Weidman Says He’ll Win Both Middleweight & Light Heavyweight Titles

Former UFC middleweight champion Chris Weidman may be on a three-fight losing streak inside the octagon, but he isn’t letting it get in the way of some lofty goals still to accomplish in MMA.

The 32-year-old Upstate New York native appeared on this week’s edition of The MMA Hour to discuss his future, which at one time looked like it would see Weidman as one of the all-time greats but has now been cast into doubt following consecutive defeats to Luke Rockhold, Yoel Romero, and Gegard Mousasi.

That hasn’t wavered the brash middleweight’s confidence, however, as he made an extremely bold claim about where his career will end when asked if he had any doubts about himself:

“Definitely not. No. I’m a hundred percent on track to do everything I said I was going to do. So I’m going to win the belt at middleweight and then I’ll go up to 205 and win the belt there after I dominate middleweight for a little bit, so that will happen.”

Weidman was last seen losing an incredibly controversial second-round TKO to Mousasi at April 8’s UFC 210 from Buffalo, New York, a bout where Weidman was given five minutes to recover from what referee Dan Miragliotta deemed was an illegal knee. Instant replay, which is apparently legal for MMA in the still-acclimating state of New York, showed he actually had his hands off the mat at the time, making Mousasi’s knee legal and resulting in a TKO win for “The Dreamcatcher” when Weidman was deemed unfit to continue by cageside doctors.

So despite his championship aspirations, Weidman knows he has to start back at square one, and he hopes that Mousasi will grant him the rematch he first said he would but soon changed his tune about after UFC 210. Weidman views it as a proving ground for both fighters to prove they are the truly better man without a confusion or controversy interfering with the outcome:

“But one step at a time, first we have to fight whoever pretty soon, hopefully Mousasi, get that done. Hopefully he steps up, realizes he doesn’t want to win that way because it’s bullshit, he was getting beat up. He knows it, so hopefully we can run that one back and he can prove that he won the fight. If he could do that, he has the opportunity to do that, and I have the opportunity to prove my side, that I’m a better fighter than him. So hopefully we get to run that back.”