Colby Covington has denied Kamaru Usman broke his jaw during his defeat in 2019 despite X-ray images seemingly confirming the injury.
The pair will renew their rivalry in a huge main-event rematch this weekend at UFC 268 after a classic first welterweight meeting two years ago.
Covington was on the receiving end of some damaging punches from Usman with the American thought to have suffered a broken jaw before the stoppage.
But the 33-year-old has now come out to deny claims he suffered a broken jaw labelling the X-ray evidence proving the injury as "fake".
“It definitely wasn’t broken,” Covington told ESPN. “He landed a clean strike, it was a good strike, but it was not a broken jaw.
"I’m tougher than anybody, I can endure anything. I knew going into that fight, a lot of people already had a biased opinion against me, so I kind of wanted to sit back and reflect [after].
"I didn’t want to come out and say anything. I wanted to see how the media was going to spin it. The things they were going to say. Were they going to bring up the things that happened in the fight?
"It was one of the worst photoshops, let me say, in the history of this sport. Someone went and took an image from Google, they put my name on [the X-ray] photo Colby Covington and first off, if you ever read an X-ray film, it’ll never read your name straight across. It’ll look backwards.
"And they photoshopped the image, and the front tooth had a cap on it, do I have caps on my front teeth? I don’t think so. It was just a bad photoshop. So nothing was broken, the only thing that was broken was (Kamaru Usman's) pride that night."
Covington has frequently pined for an opportunity to get his revenge against welterweight champion Usman.
And a bitter rivalry has continued to simmer between the pair with Covington insisting that the first contest was ended prematurely.
With the American finally getting his second-chance at a title, it could be his last opportunity to prove his credentials at the top of the 170lb division.
Who will prevail in the rematch this weekend- Kamaru Usman or Colby Covington? Let us know your prediction in the comments section below.
And former UFC middleweight Michael Bisping believes this weekend's battle is a "do-or-die" clash for 'Chaos'.
"We haven't seen too much of Colby. He hasn't been [talking too much]," Bisping told The Sun. "But I'm sure this week he's gonna be ramping up the antics.
"But I assume that's because he's got his nose to the grindstone in the gym because he knows he's got to win this fight. If he doesn't win this, he's not going to get [another] shot at being the champ.
"Probably ever again. This is that kind of do-or-die [moment] for his career."
Usman is currently classified as the leading pound-for-pound fighter and has been linked with a crossover bout with Canelo Alvarez who is the leading fighter in boxing.
