Daniel Cormier Has No Plans to Pursue Heavyweight Fight Before His Career is Over

Before Daniel Cormier was the reigning UFC 205-pound champion, he was an undefeated heavyweight who barely ever lost a round en route to become the Strikeforce Grand Prix champion back in 2012.

Cormier didn’t have an easy road to get there either after dishing out a TKO against Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva just one fight after he finished legendary heavyweight Fedor Emelianenko and then he dished out a five round dominant performance against former UFC champion Josh Barnett.

Cormier even started his UFC career as a heavyweight with two straight wins against Frank Mir and Roy Nelson before finally making the decision to move down to a lower division.

For all those victories that Cormier racked up as a heavyweight, he says the decision to compete at that division really came from a desire to avoid cutting weigh after a disastrous situation unfolded at the 2008 Olympics that kept him from competing.

During the final phase of his weight cut, Cormier’s kidneys shut down and he was sent to the hospital and deemed medically unfit to compete. His Olympic dreams died and Cormier had no desire to go through that again once he transitioned to mixed martial arts.

“It’s cool that people think that I can still do that at the level that I did in that weight class,” Cormier said about calls for him to return to heavyweight one day. “I was younger, probably a lot dumber. I wanted to fight but I didn’t want to lose weight because of the Olympics. So I was bull headed at the fact that I was going to fight up at heavyweight.

“It went well. It went better than I ever could have imagined.”

While Cormier is still undefeated as a heavyweight, he’s not looking at that as a possible option after his fight against Volkan Oezdemir this weekend at UFC 220 in Boston.

There have been suggestions that perhaps Cormier could move back up a division and challenge the winner in the main event between Stipe Miocic and Francis Ngannou, but the two-time Olympian and defending UFC light heavyweight champion says those days are behind him.

Cormier has said honestly that his time left in the sport is limited as he plans to retire by the time he’s 40 and he just doesn’t see a future at heavyweight.