Cyril Gane has heard allegations of cheating – and he’s not losing sleep over them anymore.
Reigning Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Heavyweight Champion returns to action this weekend (Saturday, November 14, 2026), defending his title against a fiery undefeated contender Josh Hockey in UFC 334main event at Madison Square Garden in New York.
But Gane enters his first undisputed title defense with the unwanted tag of being “dirty fighter.”
Accusations exploded after Gane’s UFC 321 fight for the title Tom Aspinall ended”No contest” due to an accidental poke in two eyes. Aspinall was seriously injured, underwent several eye surgeries and has been sidelined ever since.
The two controversial fights were enough for some fans – and Aspinall himself – to start calling “Bon Gamin” a fraud.
Gane doesn’t see it that way.
“You can’t say much to attack me,” Gane said RMC. “I’m sure who I am when I look in the mirror. It’s the same with me. They also want to say I’m a fraud, etc. Good, it’s the same when I look at myself in the mirror. I know I’m not a fraud.”
The 36-year-old also believes the facts – and the judges who have officiated his fights – support his claim.
“People like to talk crap about me, but it’s just about the stats or just the rules, the facts,” Gane said in the Paramount interview. “If you ask the judges – the biggest judges in the UFC – they’ll tell you, ‘No, there’s nothing special about Ciryl.’
“A lot of really good fighters say, ‘No, Ciryl’s not a cheat,'” Gane continued. “So, step by step, people try to balance that out a little bit.”
Indeed, former UFC champions Dominick Cruz and TJ Dillashaw recently defended Ganeclaiming that his mistakes were random and did not make him a deliberate fraud.
Hokit still has plenty of fun with the controversy ahead of UFC 334, recently posting footage of himself training blindfolded in preparation for a potential eye poke.
Gane can refuse to be tagged all he wants, but the quickest way to finally silence his critics would be to make a clean, undisputed title defense this weekend.
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