UFC welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre hasn't fought since last April, but he's still one of the most talked-about fighters in the world. Everyone's wondering if he's truly on track to fight Carlos Condit in a title unification bout in November, and if he'll ever be the same. Those same people are asking if he'll ever actually fight UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva. GSP did a thorough interview with Mike Chiapetta of MMA Fighting where he addressed those two topics, and brought up another new one - his loss of drive and how it affected some fights in the recent past.
First, he talks about Condit and Silva:
"I'm interested to fight whoever they put in front of me," he told MMA Fighting on Tuesday. "I'm not afraid of nobody. I want to make the biggest fight. Right now, I just came back from a long time off, and I think the first guy in line is Carlos Condit. So I'm going to get who they give me."
He then concentrates solely on a possible fight with Anderson:
"It could happen of course," he said. "It definitely can happen, but for me, that's far ahead in time. Right now, I'm not thinking about that. I can't. My main thing right now is to get better, and then when I'm going to fight, to get ready to win the fight, what I need to do to win and beat the guy. I need to focus on one thing at a time.
"You never know what's going to happen in the future," he continued. "A lot of things can change. There are a lot of big fights coming up. Chris Weidman, I've seen him in training. He's at a different level. He can be world champion if he fights Anderson first. So, this fight is not written in blood. If all goes well and all the stars are aligned, yeah, maybe one day it will happen. But right now, I just came back and I need to fight Carlos Condit. We'll see what's going to happen next."
A lot of people are going to view the idea of bringing up Weidman as a deflection or method of trying to avoid the Anderson fight, and that might be the case, but he's not wrong about Weidman or about needing to concentrate on Condit. He then switched topics onto something I didn't quite expect to hear from him - how his success made him lose some love for the sport.
SBN coverage of UFC 154: GSP vs. Condit
"Towards the end, I didn't have the drive anymore," he said. "I was doing it because I had to do it. I didn't have fun anymore. I lost a little bit of the love for the sport."
After taking some time to reassess his motivations, he wants to go back to having fun again. And that means changing up his training and trying to bring some more excitement into his fights:
"There is a saying in English that you don't repair something that is not broken," he said. "Sometimes I believe you have to break it yourself to repair it, to make it better. Because the sport of mixed martial arts will evolve. If I stay at the same level, they will catch up to me. I need to evolve, to stay ahead of game. The critics are always there. I listen to the critics. I'm very critical on myself. I want to make more finishes myself. I want to be more exciting, take more risks, be more opportunistic. I've been working on that a lot."
There's a lot more to the excellent interview, including him discussing his love of paleontology, some work he did on a video game, and more talk about a possible Silva fight. You can check out the whole thing here.