Alexander Volkanovski is exiting The Ultimate Fighter house with a new and unfavorable image of his opposing coach and upcoming opponent Brian Ortega.
When you spend several weeks in close proximity with the same people, one can’t help but learn more about their tendencies and characteristics. In the case of reigning UFC featherweight champion Alex Volkanovski, the takeaways derived from Brian Ortega weren’t all too favorable (transcription via Farah Hannoun).
“You’re trying to get reads on him and things like that, but I just think he’s f*cking awkward,” Volkanovski said of Ortega on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “He’s an awkward dude…we pretended to piss on his signs and all that, we got photos of us – again just a bit of a laugh, a bit of banter, but we know how he carries on.”
Volkanovski also determined that Ortega is “fake” and not at all the nice guy he presents himself to be, both new opinions from the featherweight champion after co-coaching the show with Ortega. Volkanovski would then elaborate on the aforementioned photos and how he and his assistant coach, Craig Jones, got a good laugh at Ortega’s expense.
“We just had a photo of his (car) keys and supposedly he had the sh*ts and he was like ‘Oh I’m gonna fight Craig,’ and I’m like I’m in the photo too,” Volkanovski said. “Why aren’t you saying you’ll fight me…but again, whether he was just going along with it or whatever it was, or he’s just easily triggered. I don’t know, but we started realizing that so we just started playing on that a fair bit and hey, knowing that he’s easily triggered, that might be a route to this next fight as well.”
The 29th season of The Ultimate Fighter kicks off on Tuesday, June 1, airing exclusively on ESPN+. If you were among those who felt Volkanovski and Ortega as coaches would be short on drama, it sounds as though there may be some surprises in store for you.