Iranian Hulk has vowed to rearrange his doomed fight with Martyn Ford after proving his skills against Kazakh Titan later this month.
Sajad Gharibi, the huge 385lb super-heavyweight Instagram influencer was due to face Ford in London back in April at The O2 arena. But the fight was cancelled after a disastrous face-off where he was flung across the room by the Brit after attempting to wrestle with his rival.
Ford cited fears for Gharibi's mental health as his reason for pulling out of the fight, saying he felt there was a legitimate chance the Iranian would harm himself after losing. But Gharibi insists that he wants to get in the ring with Ford, even after their comical head-to-head in Dubai.
To earn that opportunity, he will square off with the little-known 'Kazakh Titan' Djumanov Almat Bakhytovich. Also a body-building influencer, Bakhytovich is much smaller than Gharibi, but appears to have a fighting background of some description, and has vocally pushed for this fight since the Ford bout was called off.
"This fight is for me to set the record straight," Gharibi said in a statement about the fight's announcement. "I will be a great champion for Iran and I'll represent my people with respect and all my strength. "After I win this fight, I want to challenge myself against Martyn Ford, this fight will happen, if Martyn is too scared to fight me then the world will know. I’m stepping into the ring now ready to fight”.
Ford appears to have moved on from Gharibi, and is now eyeing up a clash with Thor Bjornsson. But with the Game of Thrones star former world's strongest man winner now looking like he may face heavyweight champion Tyson Fury in an exhibition, he may be forced to reconsider.
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"I said to the promoters not to put me face-to-face with him until we fight," Ford explained during an appearance on the Disruptors podcast with Rob Moore. "Because I'm going to fight and I don't want to do that in a gym or whatever. So they put us face-to-face and it was a c***-up on the promotional side if I'm honest. It should never have happened, it was the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong environment with no security and it was just stupid.
"Then the second face-off happened where he tried to take me down and that for me was when I started to become more concerned about the damage that would be done to him. It was very obvious and clear that there was never going to be a fair fight.
"After that, we were supposed to do a press conference and I saw him and he was crying, he was broke and he didn't want to go out, or fight, he didn't want to do anything. He was bad. He then put a post out on social media that he took down a few hours later on his stories saying that he wanted to kill himself."
