—On the eve of your fight, how is your present condition?
I feel great. Everything is spot on.

—We heard that you are looking to invest in horses? How is that going?
I haven’t yet, but as soon as the fight is over I am going to reward myself with one.

—At the last press conference, you talked about “fighting as if you don’t feel you aren’t fighting”. Are you used to feeling like that now?
I will cultivate this feeling as I fight.

—Could you please give us your thoughts on your opponent?
His striking is very good, and he is good at keeping distance. He is definitely going to be a difficult opponent for me, but I look forward to the challenge of facing him. Although it’s a tournament, I am focusing on him.

—This tournament is a bit different to others are there is a day off in between fights. What are your thoughts on this?
There really isn’t anything too different to what I’ve been doing up until now. We just increased the round time in training to 10 minutes per round. I have experience in this kind of tournament already so we just have to wait and see.

—And did you train with Fedor in Holland?
I trained with him quite a few times but my training was basically done with Gegard Mousasi. Also, when I trained with Ernesto Hoost, we had fighters come in from Holland and Russia to train with us.

—Your opponent is very tall. What are your thoughts on that?
All the guys I train with are tall. There aren’t really many guys around in this division who are smaller than me so I didn’t really think about height at all. I just have to fight at the distance I want to fight at.

—At the last press conference, you talked about the IGF being your home. Do you still feel that way?
Yes I do, the IGF is my home. It’s where I’ve had the most fights.

—How are you going to attack?
I’m not the kind of fighter who has a lot of weapons. I am going to fight like I always fight, using my strengths to my advantage.