It is the most powerful submission in the sport. It is a beautiful thing. You're holding them into you, their back is on you, and you are basically choking them gradually like a boa constrictor and once you've got them, the pressure goes on and they have to submit or they are going to stop breathing. It happened to me early in my career, and I panicked, and gave in, I tapped out too early. I learned a lot from that. I learned from it, learned how to do the move better, learned how to avoid it being done to me.

Boxing is going to have to catch up with the kind of things UFC is doing. They're getting left behind.

I mean I love movement. I mean the energy that comes from the way I move. We get energy from how we move. I mean the control I get from knowing everything about how my body feels and how it is working.

I don't know why anyone would want to do that politics stuff.

There are people who have great skills, who do great things, but don't embody the whole animal that is the fight game like I do.

Fourteen weeks before the Mendes fight I tore 80 per cent of my ACL [anterior cruciate ligament]. That is the main ligament for stability. Every day in that training camp when I was working my way back, I was saying "real champions fight through any adversity". That is why I am a real champion and he is not. Look at my eye [he had seven stitches put in an old wound after an injury in training the night before we met]. Fighters fight on. Aldo got scared, he went running and I worry he will run again.

Power and speed aren't enough to overcome someone who is strategic, who knows what you'll do before you do it and can turn it on you; someone who is mentally engaged and combines the whole package.