One of the strongest kickboxers of all time retires on Saturday with one last match: “I arrived in Italy in a truck: 13 years old and 13,000 fights. I would get up at 6 a.m., go for a run, then go to the construction site to work, and I would ask for the heavy jobs to become strong. At my first match, I earned €1,700, then I won a million, but take away the taxes…”

Giorgio Petrosyan belongs to the lineage of Sinner, Tomba, and Vale Rossi: in his sport, kickboxing, he has won everything and is considered one of the strongest of all time. In his gym, he wants you to know this right away. As soon as you walk in, there is a display case with all the belts he has won, which takes only a minute to look through. He has decided to retire, and when a king retires, he doesn’t just say it, he looks his people in the eye: Petrosyan will do so on Saturday evening at the Allianz in Milan. One last fight against Portugal’s José Sousa, one last chance to see “the doctor” — they call him that because he strikes as precisely as a scalpel — at work. His is a story of unspeakable sacrifices, which you can read in his two eyes, black as night, as he shows you his scars.

Petrosyan, why are you quitting?

“I want to, but preparing for a match has become hell. Do you know how many injuries I’ve had?”

No, list them.

“I’ve broken my left hand 11 times, my right hand I don’t even know how many times, then three jaw fractures, knees, feet, cervical hernia, broken nose, which is normal for me. I’ve always had surgery in time and solved the problems, but when your head wants to push your body, it says, ‘Oh, stop, you’re not 20 years old.’”

But he’s saying goodbye by fighting. A noble gesture.

“Yes, I’ll be fully prepared despite everything. It was my brother’s dream to organize my last fight, and doing it in front of my people fills me with pride. We’ll celebrate with a great victory.”

Petrosyan’s story begins in Armenia. His first memory?

“When school ends, my father takes the whole family on vacation to Lake Sevan, where we eat well and are happy. There is already war, soldiers are around, I make friends with some of them, and in exchange for food, they let me shoot a Kalashnikov in the water.”

Even as a child, Petrosyan already had fighting on his mind.

“Before going to school every morning at 6 a.m., I go for a run, then I pull a bag out from under my bed and start hitting it. I copy movies. One day I’m Bruce Lee, another day I’m Van Damme…”

War, we said. A few years later, she, her father, and her brother Armen hid in a truck and arrived in Italy.

“I remember watching Italy vs. Brazil on TV a few months earlier. I was rooting for Brazil and thought it would be wonderful to go there, my brother Armen was rooting for Del Piero and said Italy was better. In the end, his dream came true. But my first memories of Italy are terrible: Milan Central Station, freezing cold, we don’t know where to sleep, I have a fever of 40 degrees and my throat is on fire, my father is looking for help.”

Then you ended up at Caritas in Gorizia.

“And even there I trained, alone. I tied mattresses to a pole and practiced kicks and punches. An Armenian friend took me to Paolo Vidoz’s gym, but he was in Sydney for the Olympics, so I had to wait for him to come back to sign up. Improving is an obsession for me. I get up at dawn, run for miles, then go to work on a construction site and deliberately ask to be assigned the heaviest jobs to gain strength. At the age of 20, I quit being a bricklayer because going to the gym once a day was no longer enough for me.”

In 2004, kickboxing brought in the first money.

“In Bologna, I fought against a Thai fighter. They gave me €1,700, and as soon as I got it, I gave it to my father because my family needed it.”

His career: 115 fights with only three defeats, one of which was rigged.

“Yes, in Thailand. There were a lot of bets behind the fight, they put diuretics in my water, and I arrived in the ring completely dehydrated. I could have given up, but I was carrying the Italian flag, and Italians are considered unreliable there, people who go down immediately or give up the fight. ‘Even if you can’t stand up, you have to fight out of pride,’ I told myself.”

You’re not Thai or Dutch, in short, you don’t come from a country with a tradition in this sport: you came from nowhere and turned it upside down, double the effort.

“To motivate me, my father always said, ‘Gorizia is a small town, the stronger you become, the more the world will know you. I took the harder route, but that’s why it was twice as rewarding.“

You and your brother only received your passports in 2014, on the basis of your sporting achievements.

”It bothered me a little, I’ve always had only one flag, the Italian one: that’s right, I grew up here. But without a passport, I had a lot of problems. To go abroad, I only had a travel document, which is not recognized in other countries. I spent hours at customs explaining myself, and until the last minute, I didn’t know if I would be able to compete or not.“

What is Italy like for those coming from abroad?

”Something isn’t working. Those who do wrong don’t pay. Not all newcomers are the same. For those who deal drugs, steal, and cause trouble, stricter rules are needed. It’s not possible that they can be released after two days and go back to doing whatever they want.”

He won the closest thing to a Van Damme movie plot: the One Championship Tournament, the world’s best in a knockout competition, with a million dollars at stake.

“I found out that Van Damme was a dancer, and my admiration for him fell a little… Actors make movies, I fight. I started thanks to them, but I was better because I really turned a dream into reality. The million? Take away the taxes…”

His toughest opponent?

“That Thai guy in Bologna in 2004. I had only had 25 fights, he had had almost 300. No one wanted to fight us. It ended in a draw and I suffered a lot because I wasn’t strong enough. If I met him today, he wouldn’t last even one round.“

In combat sports, how important is technique and how important is the mind?

”Technique is very important, but you need your mind to use it. You can have a Ferrari, but it’s useless if you don’t know how to drive it.“

You train a lot of young people. Do you see the fire you had?

”No. I know it’s a mistake to make comparisons, but if I offered the training I did at 16 in the gym, a normal person wouldn’t last three days.”

Why is that?

“When I arrived, I was 13 years old and had been in 13,000 fights in Armenia, where the mentality is different. You see a lot of people who train just to take a photo, post it on social media, and show their friends that they fight. It’s just that life is good in Italy. If you’re doing well, where do you get your aggression from?”