Tom Aspinall believes Jon Jones was praying he'd lose to Curtis Blaydes at UFC 304 last month.
England's Aspinall, the interim UFC heavyweight champion, met Blaydes in the card's co-main event. He successfully defended his title with a first-round knockout over the American.
Jones, who holds the promotion's undisputed heavyweight title but hasn't fought since winning the vacant belt with a submission defeat of Ciryl Gane early last year, hasn't said much about Aspinall's fight with Blaydes.
Aspinall believes that would have been different if he'd lost.
"Jon Jones, he was praying I’d lose that fight against Curtis Blaydes — praying that I would," Aspinall told UFC analysts Michael Bisping and Anthony Smith on the Believe You Me podcast. "There’s nowhere that you can find publicly — nowhere — him saying that he’ll fight me. It doesn’t exist. I challenge anybody watching this interview to go and find a statement, a quote, a video, where Jon Jones is stating that he’ll fight me after I’ve fought Stipe. It doesn’t exist.
"We know he’s a bit overweight these days. The guy was sat there [watching my fight] with the Cheeto fingers, the Doritos on his fingers, with his iPhone in hand, waiting for me to get knocked out so he could start Tweeting about it.
"Since I’ve won that fight, he’s gone completely quiet."
Aspinall believes Jones' silence will continue until he retires.
"He’ll continue to go completely quiet about me until he retires, because there’s no way on earth that he’ll fight me," he said. "No chance. I will retire Jon Jones without even fighting him."
Ordinarily, the UFC would match Aspinall and Jones up against each other as quickly as possible to unify their heavyweight titles, but in a strange break from protocol, the promotion is determined to pit Jones against 42-year-old former champ Stipe Miocic, who has not fought since a knockout loss to Francis Ngannou in 2021.
The fight is currently unscheduled, but is still in the works, according to UFC CEO Dana White's latest update.
Aspinall has the utmost respect for Jones and Miocic's accomplishments, but can't help but shake his head at the planned matchup.
"Dana White can say whatever he wants, them guys are not the best heavyweights in the world right now," he said. "I’m not saying that they’ve not had amazing careers, because I idolize those guys. I want to have a career like that, that’s what I’m aiming to do with my life — what they’ve done — but they’re not the best right now. Right now, they’re definitely not the best, so let’s stop talking all this [expletive] like they are."
