Khamzat Chimaev Turned Down Kyle Snyder, Asked For Bo Nickal Instead — And The UFC Already Said No

Khamzat Chimaev signed with Real American Freestyle, then spent the next month declining the one wrestler in the building he could actually face.

His RAF debut was set for RAF 10 on June 13 at Chaifetz Arena in St. Louis. Within days of the announcement, Olympic gold medalist Kyle Snyder—RAF's reigning light-heavyweight champion—publicly challenged him. Snyder isn't under UFC contract. He has no relationship to Hunter Campbell, and he's already on RAF cards. He's the only top-tier wrestling opponent Chimaev's contract situation lets him face anyway.

Chimaev passed.

"I could grapple with Bo Nickal," Chimaev told Adam Zubayraev on YouTube. "He switched to MMA, too, he's an MMA fighter now."

Bo Nickal is a UFC middleweight. He fights for the same company Chimaev fights for. He signed with RAF last year. A Chimaev vs. Nickal RAF booking would be the exact matchup the UFC had spent the previous six months killing. Arman Tsarukyan vs. Colby Covington was killed at RAF 8. Booked again at RAF 9. Killed again. The promotion's stated logic, every time: two UFC-contracted fighters can't meet on a competitor's card.

Chimaev wasn't breaking ground on a new request. He was volunteering for an outcome the calendar had already taught him.

The wrestler he wouldn't fight

Snyder's resume read like a checklist someone made up to be intimidating. Olympic gold at 97 kg in Rio 2016. Olympic silver in Tokyo. Multiple-time World Champion at 97 kg, including Las Vegas 2015, Paris 2017, Belgrade 2022, and Zagreb 2025. Three NCAA heavyweight titles for Ohio State. He was the reigning RAF light-heavyweight champion right then, which was the part most relevant. The man wrestles for a living, on RAF cards, that week.

Chimaev's stated reason for declining was the credibility gap.

"How does it make sense to wrestle an Olympic champion? What's the point?" he said. "I didn't spend years in the gym doing thousands of double-leg entries. The last time I even worked on double-legs was with Arman Tsarukyan—just joking around."

Read that twice. The reigning UFC middleweight champion, on the record, said the last serious double-leg work he did was a sparring exchange with a UFC lightweight. This was the same Chimaev who won the 2016, 2017, and 2018 Swedish Freestyle Wrestling National Championships at 86 and 92 kg. Twelve matches across those three brackets. Three pins. Seven technical falls. Combined score against opponents: 105–2.

That's a wrestler. The kind who can credibly take a meeting with Kyle Snyder. The freestyle resume was right there. Chimaev would rather bury it than concede the point.

The wrestler he wanted instead

Bo Nickal is a three-time NCAA champion at Penn State who trained under Cael Sanderson and posted one of the most decorated college careers of the last twenty years. He was currently a UFC middleweight who had been floated for the Trump White House "Freedom 250" card that spring, a card he said he hadn't actually signed for yet. And yes, he was signed with RAF. A Nickal vs. Chimaev wrestling match in St. Louis on June 13 was the kind of thing RAF was built to put on Fox Nation.

It was also a non-starter. Nickal was under UFC contract. Chimaev was under UFC contract. The UFC had said no, in writing, to two iterations of essentially this matchup with different names attached. The UFC's reasoning hadn't moved an inch: every UFC fighter who wrestles another UFC fighter on a competitor's card erodes the UFC's leverage over both of them. Hunter Campbell wasn't going to approve this booking because the headline was bigger.

Chimaev knew that. He watched the same news everyone else did. He'd just signed the deal Tsarukyan tried to sign and got told no on. He was asking for the one match the UFC had spent six months refusing to approve, and turning down the one match the UFC had no formal lane to block.

The kindest read was that Chimaev was making a public play for special treatment, a "look, the champion wants this, let it happen" gambit. The harsher read was the one Snyder hinted at without saying it.

Snyder, behaving like the adult

Snyder responded in Yahoo Sports like the only person in the building who'd been to college.

"He's a good promoter and I think it will be fun to one day wrestle him, if he ever wants to," Snyder said. He acknowledged a hybrid ruleset wouldn't favor him: "I don't have any boxing or jiu-jitsu experience. I'd probably get pieced up in that way." Then he gave Chimaev the on-ramp:

"I think that before we wrestle, it would probably make sense for him to get some other matches underneath him and then we'll see."

That was the line. Snyder was the one offering Chimaev a way to avoid embarrassment: get a few RAF tune-ups, then we talk. Chimaev's answer was to reject the on-ramp and ask for the one matchup that required three layers of permission and had been denied every prior chance.

What this was actually about

Real American Freestyle existed because there was a market for "established names try wrestling." Cejudo, Maroulis, Khinchegashvili, Snyder. That was the bill. The whole pitch was real wrestling matches between people you already know. Snyder was the most decorated American freestyler on the active roster. A Chimaev vs. Snyder match, under a sensible ruleset and with a credible buildup, would have been the headline RAF needed.

Chimaev wanted the smaller match. Or, more accurately, he wanted the match the UFC would block, because asking for the match the UFC would block was an easier place to land than asking for the match he might lose.

For RAF, it was a soft kind of disaster. They'd paid for a champion-level UFC name, and the first thing he did with the platform was turn down the actual wrestler in the building and ask for a sibling-promotion crossover the UFC wouldn't sign off on.

The June 13 card still needed an opponent. Snyder was on the roster. So was Khinchegashvili. So were several Olympic medalists with no UFC entanglements at all.

Whether Chimaev faced a free agent or quietly stalled into a no-show, the line Snyder said out loud was the one that lasted: get some other matches underneath you, and then we'll see.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

• Khamzat Chimaev Turns Down Olympic Gold Medalist for RAF Match in Honest Confession
• Khamzat Chimaev declines Olympic champion Kyle Snyder's challenge; Snyder still hopes to face him in RAF
• RAF Arrives In St. Louis With RAF 10 On June 13
• Khamzat Chimaev — Wikipedia (Swedish Freestyle Wrestling record)
• Kyle Snyder — Wikipedia (Olympic and World Championship credentials)
• Khamzat Chimaev open to wrestle Bo Nickal for RAF, not Kyle Snyder