Colby Covington has some choice words for Ricardo Liborio.
Covington responded to the American Top Team (ATT) co-founder’s criticism of the UFC welterweight contender for his post-fight antics at UFC Fight Night 119 last weekend. After his win over Demian Maia, Covington called Brazil a “dump” and the Sao Paulo crowd “filthy animals.”
Liborio, who also revealed he is no longer a coach at ATT, said in a statement he does not condone Covington’s behavior after the Maia win.
Covington, though, doesn’t care about what Liborio thinks of him. Covington said that Liborio has not coached at ATT for the better part of two or three years, confirming ATT owner Dan Lambert’s claim. Lambert told MMAjunkie.com that Liborio moved away from Coconut Creek for family reasons two years ago but was kept on the payroll at first. After being told to coach a few times per week and not showing up to classes, Liborio was finally removed from the payroll earlier this year.
“Ricardo Liborio is a joke,” Covington told BloodyElbow.com. “That guy’s been out of ATT for over two, three years. That guy’s a complete joke trying to use my name and my fame and the stuff with Brazil to put him over and make him look like the good guy from ATT.
“He’s been out of ATT for a while; he was using Dan Lambert, the ATT owner. He was using Dan. He was picking up these paychecks two or three years ago, never showing up to work. That guy is a conman, he’s a scumbag, and he’s acting like a piece of sh-t trying to use my name to put him over.”
Like Liborio, several ATT fighters, including Brazilians in women’s bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes and Antonio Silva, expressed their disappointment with their teammate’s post-fight words. But Covington sticks with just a handful of people when training at ATT, he said, and doesn’t care about what non-training partners say or think. Anyone who criticized his post-fight interview, Covington said, are “haters” and “marks.”
“I’m ATT to the bone. I have my close circle of people, my clique — Jorge Masvidal, Mike Brown, Dan Lambert,” Covington said. “I’m not friends with everybody. It’s a gym, but this is a one-man sport.”
Covington said it is important to have a small group of people to regularly train with at such a large and commercialized gym like ATT has become. If a fighter tries to train with everyone, he said, they’ll face certain consequences.
“You don’t need a big group; people are always gonna try to use you and do bad things,” Covington said. “There’s always going to be cliques — everywhere you go, there’s gonna be cliques, there’s gonna be people that gravitate towards each other. We have different people from different countries, so people are gonna take sides. It is what it is. You’re just seeing people take sides from what happened with my incident in Brazil last weekend.”
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