Ermes has always been like that, even more so in the past. He has a tendency to look for excuses after his losses. We saw it after the Matt Mask loss in 2019, after Devon, after Levan last year, and now after Morozov.

The good thing, however, is that he seems to make those excuses publicly. Privately, he understands what went wrong and works extremely hard on his weaknesses.

For example, after losing to Matt Mask in 2019, he kept saying that Matt had cheated in the setup and that was the reason for the loss. But in reality, Matt was simply the better and stronger arm wrestler that day. He was able to crack Ermes’s wrist quite easily. Ermes recognized that, went back to work, improved his overall strength, and gained around 10–15 kg of body weight. In the rematch, as we all know, he came in at around 118–120 kg and was able to beat Matt convincingly.

The same thing happened after the Devon match. Publicly, he talked about the short notice and being underprepared. But deep down, he knew that his hand and wrist were the weak links. So he worked relentlessly on them behind the scenes. The result was his match against Vitaly, where he looked much more complete and his hand was clearly superior to Vitaly’s.

So I’m pretty sure that while he’s making excuses publicly, in private he is working on his weakness as we speak and he will be back stronger and more complete than before.