Part One saw Fighters Only arrive in the historic Dutch city of Breda to visit Golden Glory's headquarters and witness the full-contact pro-only sparring session known as 'Mincemeat Day'. In part two, we head across the country to a Golden Glory satellite gym with Sergei Kharitonov....

The night has not been a success. My room is located above the back door of a late-night bar and the comings and goings of its various patrons keep me awake until 3am. When that noise dies off, the banging of the hot water pipe in the ceiling over my bed takes over. Conspiring with the water pipes is the church across the square in this historic town of Breda. For some reason, it has been decreed that its bell must make a noise every fifteen minutes.

Every fifteen minutes. 

Sleep proves elusive but it must have arrived at some point because next thing I know I am suddenly jolted awake, distressed and fumbling in the dark to try and stop the hellish noise coming from my cellphone, which was set for a 7am start. Freezing (the hot water pipe has been going full force, sadly the radiators have not) I emerge from the covers to stand under the lamentable lukewarm drizzle that passes for a shower. I catch sight of myself in the mirror. Should I walk past any schools this morning, mothers will point me out to their children and warn them to study hard lest they end up “like that poor man”.

After a delightful breakfast consisting of one somewhat stiff croissant and a single black coffee - under the watchful eye of the dining room kommandant, who has strict orders not to allow seconds of anything - I wrap up and wander out into the Dutch January morning. I head for De Klok hotel on the main square, where Sergei Kharitonov is staying. From here we are to be collected by one of the Golden Glory crew and taken halfway across the country to the city of Utrecht, where Sergei and Jon Olav Einemo will be training under Martijn de Jong for the day.

Waiting in the hotel lobby is Sasha, one of many backstage staff with Golden Glory. He owns a nightclub in Breda - Coyote Ugly - but is serving as a driver and guide today. He offers coffee; I have a black one. Sergei is taking his time coming downstairs so I have another. Minutes later I wash that down with a  Red Bull. Nothing. I might as well be eating snow. I am mentally wishing destruction by bombs on the church bell when Sergei arrives with his girlfriend in tow.

They decline coffee in favour of setting off immediately. We pile into Sasha’s car, Sergei in the front passenger seat and myself and Mrs Sergei in the back seat, with me seated behind the driver. I am under the impression Utrecht is just down the road. Its actually just over an hour away. We set off.  Sergei and his companion don’t really speak English while my Russian is limited to ‘spasiba’; conversation is impossible and so I rest my head on the window and, warm for the first time that day, begin to drift off.

Suddenly I am jolted awake for the second time. Sergei is going MENTAL into his phone, barking at someone in Russian and not sounding pleased at all. This goes on for about ten minutes. Despite the fact that it is not aimed at me, it is still unsettling. Sergei in person is massive - he pretty much fills the car on his own - and he probably doesn’t even need the old-school Nokia cellphone which looks so comically small in his giant paw, he could just roll down the window and shout.

But the windows are sealed shut to keep out the January cold and so Sergei’s peals of Slavic rage reverberate throughout our Peugeot echo chamber. Imagine someone blowing a Viking war horn in a cavernous old church and you’ll have some notion of how his bear-like bellows fill the air. And then, just as I fear Sergei is going to punch holes in the ceiling, it seems he has won. A great big laugh and he clicks down several gears into happy conversational tones. Outside the car Dutch towns drift past in the morning gloom, blissfully unaware of how close they came to being levelled by the rage of this Russian god of war.

Beside me on the back seat is Sergei’s raven-haired partner, who like him hails from the land of the Rus. She might be called Anna but don’t hold me to that because much of the morning passed in a sleepy blur and my memory is hazy. Regardless, she has turned out looking fabulously glamorous in a pair of Christian Louboutin heels and a figure-hutting black satin bodysuit with a line of gold sequins down the side. Glancing at my Fighters Only hooded top I feel a touch underdressed, although Sergei is keeping it real with a well-worn tracksuit of his own.

Time ticks by as we traverse the country and out of nowhere Sergei and his girlfriend break into an argument. I always had the impression that the Russians were a cold, reserved people who did not talk a lot and displayed little in the way of emotion. How wrong I was. This exchange quickly moves from exasperation to anger to tears (hers) and a prolonged sullen silence (his). As we are wedged together on the back seat I have nowhere to escape and to say I feel awkward is an understatement. The silence, broken only by sobs, is deafening. It actually freezes my limbs and am tense and still. I don’t know if this is some ingrained Olde Englande politeness but at this moment I would prefer to be sitting on the roof. This is excruciating.

And then just like that, another lightning-quick reversal in mood and the two are talking again, little streams of comment gradually giving way to a river of conversation and then a full flow of giggles and laughter. Some sort of resolution has been achieved and Sergei’s girl spends much of the rest of the journey ruffling his hair and planting kisses on him. Sergei, warrior that he is, suffers these amorous indignities with stoic indifference, torn between wanting this public ruffling to stop and not wanting to set off another argument.

The ruffling does not stop; we drive on. The rest of the journey is uneventful, although I am impressed by the enormous range of pornography on offer at a service station when we stop for bottles of water. Holland has always struck me as an efficient and progressive nation and the way the Dutch people have addressed the issue of emergency roadside smut is an example to the rest of the world. North Korea take note.

And so to Utrecht, where we arrive at ‘Duncan’s Gym’ for the MMA training and sparring. Head coach De Jong is all smiles as he emerges from his top of the range Audi, shaking hands and patting backs. Glowing with charisma and good humour, De Jong is one of those personalities who fills a room. Not in an overbearing way, but with a sense of bonhomie and camaraderie that makes you feel you’ve known him for years rather than minutes.

Also present is Afghan killer Siyar Bahadurazda, who has driven down from Amsterdam to train despite having a broken hand. It turns out he broke the hand on the head of Hubert, a 20-year-old blond-haired prospect who Golden Glory insiders have very bright hopes for. A well-educated handsome young man, Hubert comes from a good family and looks like a model for Abercrombie and Fitch. But he has won somewhere in the region of 30 kickboxing matches already and his outside appearance belies his in-ring personality. He is absolutely fearless.

As I’m standing there the bright winter sun is eclipsed; a shadow falls over me. Feeling the chill, I turn to see a mountain of a man behind me. My face is level with his chest. “Hello, I’m Jon,” says Olav Einemo, ADCC standout and the only man ever to tap Roger Gracie in competition. I tell him that I am also called John. “Good name!” he laughs, clapping my on the shoulder. It nearly knocks the croissant out of me. I hope I don’t get on his really good side; I wouldn’t survive a hug.

Marloes Coenen is wandering around, limbering up and getting ready for the training. By this stage I am holding a camcorder and I accidentally have it trained on her buttocks as she bends to fish something out of her bag (I swear this was pure coincidence; it wasn’t even turned on!). “Hey, don’t you film that!” she warns with a grin, mock-threatening. Siyar hoots with laughter, “Its for the private collection eh?”

The banter makes for a marked difference with the previous days training in Breda, where K-1 standout Gokhan Saki was preparing for his January 28 clash with Badr Hari, the so-called ‘Golden Boy’ of kickboxing. I had expected Saki, like Siyar, to be a playful character full of jokes and pranks but he is the total opposite. Saki is a very serious, stone-faced young man, not unpleasant but with a brooding presence and an air of urgency that suggests he likes a joke now and again, but only when the real work is concluded.

The contrast is interesting but as different as their personalities are, their training mentalities are similar. Both are strictly business when it comes to the drills and sparring, although it does seem from my limited exposure to them both Siyar has more of a tendency to stop and help a less-experienced training partner with his weak spots or a point of technique. Saki was presented with a fairly novice heavyweight in yesterday’s sparring and fairly annihilated him, although the heavyweight in question was 130 kilos and much taller than the Turkish-Dutchman.

Like yesterday, training today consists of drills to start with and so the various persons present - perhaps twelve or fourteen altogether - pair up with partners of roughly equal size and work through the drills that De Jong orders. There is some striking practice, some clinch work and some wrestling. Sergei is paired with Einemo and the two have a pretty good go at it during the stand-up.

The wrestling portion is interesting because you can instantly see Einemo’s world-class grappling brain. No sooner does an opening present itself than he already has a hook in, or an arm round a neck. For a man this size his jiu jitsu is particularly fluid and technical. It is comparatively rare to see in a heavyweight because they are naturally so strong that they find it hard to learn perfect technique via disabling their natural attributes.

Sergei proves to be a useful training partner for Einemo, who is having fun with the single leg and a trip from clinch. He offers advice with broken English and gesticulation and by the end of the session has added some useful tricks to Einemo’s arsenal. On the other side of the mat, broken-handed Siyar is hammering knees into a kick shield with such force that the somewhat corpulent fellow holding it looks like he wants to be sick. 

Coenen spends much of the session working with Hubert and it has to be noted, she appears to be the most technical on the mat that day, repeatedly going over drills until she feels comfortable that they have been executed correctly. She has a marked attention to detail and a high work-rate, although nobody on the mat is slacking it has to be said.

Unlike yesterday at Golden Glory HQ, today is not about hard-sparring and full-contact wars. The session is very much a skill-builder and the sparring at the end is of light-technical nature. Kharitonov and Olav Einemo do some rounds and Einemo’s striking has clearly come on a lot, certainly in terms of set-ups and combination flow.

Golden Glory heavily favour use of the knee if in distance to throw it. And if they aren’t inside the distance to throw it, they practice bridging that gap with their hands, then throwing it. In short, you are very, very likely to take a sickening knee to the midriff on more than one occasion if you are fighting one of the Golden Glory crew.

The rationale is simple enough. The knee is easy to hide if thrown towards the end of a punch combination, is not the easiest thing to defend without compromising your balance and/or head-defence and yields big results if landed effectively. It is literally a sickener if put into the solar plexus with force. Look at how Golden Glory product Alistair Overeem dealt with Brock Lesnar. He happily wandered through Lesnar’s punches, with utter disregard for them, to hammer the former champion with knees. Lesnar’s face said everything that needs to be said about how the strikes felt.

This particular day the crew are going through some knee-setup drills and Einemo is practicing enthusiastically. He has nowhere near the striking level of Overeem of course, but the sheer enormity of the man means that his knees pack a raw force that reverberates through the room. His UFC on FOX 2 opponent Mike Russow will definitely know about it if Einemo lands one.

Training concludes with the fighters forming a line facing De Jong. Then they walk forward one by way to high-five him and take a place behind him, facing forwards. De Jong then high-fives the next fighter, who then proceeds to high-five the fighter behind him, and so on. Gradually the queue behind De Jong grows larger than the one facing him and then disappears entirely; everyone has high-fived everyone and its time to go.

Its a nice way to end the session and a brief but useful piece of team-building. There are some more hugs and bat-packs before everyone clears the mat and goes to get changed. Fighters Only sets the camera up for some interviews, speaking to De Jong and Siyar in an upstairs room that crackles with January cold. We don’t have long though - Sergei is waiting to get back in the car so we can drive across country again, this time to Eindhoven.

He wants to visit Nikkon Sports, the flagship store of the martial arts brand established in the 1990s by Bas Boon, the managing director of the Golden Glory empire. Nikkon supplies pretty much all of the equipment the Golden Glory team use, manufacturing their own brand, plus Golden Glory-branded equipment and a clothing line called Fight Game.

Nikkon are more than happy to supply the various bits and pieces that Golden Glory fighters need for their training. But Sergei is headed to Eindhoven with a glint in his eye. He isn’t going for a few bits and pieces. Sergei is going shopping…

Part three: coming tomorrow