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Why was UFC champion Sean Strickland chased on street during Edmonton livestream?

Middleweight champion was streaming on streets of Alberta capital ahead of Fight Event before later attending an Oilers game.

Published Oct 16, 2026  •  Last updated 9 hours ago  •  3 minute read

UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland during a livestream on the streets of Edmonton. Sean Strickland/Instagram

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UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland’s trip to Edmonton has been an eventful one — and he hasn’t even taken part in the MMA promotion’s actual event.

While the two-time champ is in the Alberta capital for Saturday’s UFC Fight Night event, Strickland has been taking in the sights around town — but mostly stirring up some of the locals during livestreams from the streets.

After having encountered “zombies” and a “dead” person on Wednesday, Strickland was back at it again on Thursday, livestreaming himself as he took a walk around Edmonton.

Strickland was filming himself on Instagram Live while he was speaking with two people who demanded that he turn off his phone’s camera.

“It’s recording me, not you guys,” Strickland said while recording in selfie mode.

A woman claims that he was “just recording us,” which he denied while demonstrating to the people that the camera was only shooting himself.

The women insisted that Strickland had filmed them and then apparently approached him and appeared to take a swipe at his phone.

Strickland then ran away and showed that the unidentified women had given chase as he passed a police vehicle.

Strickland captioned the clip “I’d like to file a police report,” and shared a screenshot of the woman with her face blurred while he wrote, “Almost got me.”

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Later on Thursday afternoon, Strickland shared a post of himself approaching a group of apparently homeless people sitting on the street with the caption “The free folk of Alberta.”

In the clip, Strickland is asked by a woman if she can have his coffee, to which he obliges while telling her that he is filming the interaction.

He asks her if she likes living in Canada, to which she responds, “Yeah, all I need is five bucks change and I can get up and high.”

Strickland then laughs and gives her props while saying, “I love it, I support it.”

“Five Canadian dollars gets you high. Not a bad price,” Strickland wrote.

Fellow UFC fighter Anthony Hernandez has been spending time with Strickland while in Edmonton and shared his side of the story while claiming to have inhaled second-hand drug smoke.

“I knew he was out here cornering and he said, ‘let’s go enjoy Canada,’” Hernandez said in an interview with Home of Fight.

“This f***** is out here getting chased by tweakers, we accidentally inhaled crack walking down the street.”

Strickland’s Edmonton adventures weren’t solely about patrolling the streets and documenting his encounters. The California native also attended Thursday night’s game between the Oilers and Utah Mammoth.

Strickland shared a clip of the on-ice action from his front-row seat in one of the corners at Rogers Place.

He apparently was impressed with the sport – and also that the American side won – later sharing that he’d love to give the hockey a try.

“I wish I was here longer I wanna try hockey…. Other than MMA that was hands down the best sport I’ve ever seen,” he wrote.

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After spending his first day in Edmonton on Wednesday, the outspoken California native was quick to slam the city, calling out apparent drug issues and a lack of policing.

“Left downtown and yep this place is a trash can. Zombies everywhere,” Strickland posted on X.

“It’s not American ‘I might have to kill a crack head’ bad, but it’s definitely an open drug market with zero police.”

He also shared a photo of a person on a downtown sidewalk doing “the fenti fold” — a symptom of using Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid drug. He also claimed to have encountered five people doing the same thing.

The most troubling scene that he shared was a clip of himself walking down a street with a person lying down behind a fence that Strickland said could be “dead.”

“Pretty confident this man is dead or least freshly assaulted from the Crack head mumbling,” he wrote, while adding in the clip: “I’ve gotta get out of here.”

It was unclear if the person was actually dead, unconscious or sleeping at the time while another man wearing a dark hoodie approached them.

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