Rakic on heavyweight move: “I can fight much more often”

At the UFC media day in Belgrade, during the week of the fight that moves him up to heavyweight, Aleksandar Rakic mostly talked about food. Not about rankings, not about the Pole waiting for him on Saturday. About breakfast.

“I’m enjoying Fight Week finally! I’m enjoying every second! I eat what I want. I can drink when I want.”

For a man who spent 20 years staying away from the fridge during fight week, that is not a throwaway line. It is the whole point. Aleksandar Rakic (14-6) meets Marcin Tybura at Belgrade Arena on Saturday, August 1, 2026, in his first heavyweight bout after 20 professional fights at light heavyweight, 11 of them in the UFC. It is also the first fight of his career on Serbian soil, even though he was born and raised in Austria. Part of his camp was done here.

What the scale said

At the official weigh-in Rakic came in at 237.5 pounds, roughly 107.7 kilograms. Tybura hit 254 pounds, about 115.2 kilograms. That is a gap of just under 7.5 kilograms in the Pole’s favour.

The heavyweight limit is 265 pounds, around 120 kilograms, so Rakic enters his new division some 12 kilograms under the ceiling. At 6-foot-4 he still carries a light heavyweight frame. The difference is that it no longer gets drained before every appearance.

Why change divisions at all?

Because the old one was eating his calendar. He spelled the arithmetic out in full for the first time, and it is medical rather than tactical.

“In the Light Heavyweight division, my body needed a really long time to recover from the weight cut, so I couldn’t take a fight immediately after or a short-notice fight because I needed to prepare my body.”

He says he cut weight for two decades, starting at 14. The last cuts ran to 38 or 39 pounds, roughly 17 to 18 kilograms, before every fight. Each one cost him another two months of getting his body back to zero. Add it up: two months of camp, the fight, two months of repair, and a year barely holds two bookings. He put it in a picture that sticks, like owning a Ferrari with a small amount of gasoline inside.

“Now at Heavyweight, I can fight much more often, and I want to be much more active.”

The four losses behind him

The context is unforgiving. Rakic arrives in Belgrade on a four-fight losing run, and his last win came five years ago. In order, the men who beat him:

• Jiri Prochazka, at UFC 300
• Magomed Ankalaev
• Azamat Murzakanov, at UFC 321

He summed that stretch up in one line: “Oh man, I’ve been through a dark time, heavy time in my last years.”

Which is why the move up is not only a medical decision. It is also the last argument he has left. Asked what the Arena crowd should expect, he gave the longest answer of the day.

“They can expect a healthy Aleksandar Rakic, healthy ‘Rocket’ who is not suffering before the fight. I’m enjoying every moment, I’m really focused on the fight, but I also don’t put any extra pressure on myself. Fighting in Serbia, in front of my country is enough pressure already, so I don’t put any extra pressure on myself. I’m confident, I had a great camp, and I’m ready for it. I just need to be focused and doing what I’ve done these last months, and there is no doubt I am getting my hand raised.”

Tybura has the same problem and a different fix

We wrote earlier about the clip Rakic sent Tybura, with the message that this time he would be the one doing the showing. The Pole is 39, holds a 27-11 record and a place inside the heavyweight top 12, and he too comes to Belgrade off two straight defeats, the most recent to Ante Delija. Two men with the same hole in their form, except one of them is changing divisions to patch it.

If Rakic loses a fifth time, the move up will not work as an explanation, because Friday’s scale showed he did not turn up hollowed out. If he wins, he gets the thing light heavyweight never allowed him, the option to be back in the cage in two or three months instead of six. The rest is Saturday night’s business.