Devon Larratt rejects quitting rumors and rules manipulation claims

Devon Larratt was forced to answer two charged claims at once: that he had quit in Europe and that the rules were being manipulated around his matches. The dispute landed in a sport where referee calls, start procedures, strap application, fouls and rule interpretation can decide a result as surely as hand strength.

Gold's Arm put the controversy front and center in a story posted July 23, 2025, and the fallout did not stop there. A separate Gold's Arm item tied Larratt to the Baku event confusion, where he said plainly, "There is No Baku Event." That denial mattered because the rumor mill had already turned a match dispute into something bigger, blending location talk, event speculation and questions about whether the story being told matched what happened at the table.

The manipulation claim carried even more weight than the quitting rumor. In elite armwrestling, the difference between a clean start and a bad grip can change the entire match, especially under the standards used by East vs West, the World Armwrestling Federation and No Limits Armwrestling. That is why arguments over center pressure, strap buckling and the referee's grip never stay small for long. A bad call on a foul or a start can make a dominant pull look uncertain, and a tight stop can look like surrender to fans who did not see the setup from the table side.

Larratt has spent plenty of time in public on exactly those issues. Gold's Arm also surfaced his reaction to the new armwrestling rules, while another item highlighted his comments about different rule sets. A separate seminar video on strap buckle and the referee's grip showed how technical he has become about the mechanics that most viewers only notice after a controversial restart. That background makes his response easier to frame: he was not just pushing back on gossip, he was arguing over the conditions that make a match fair or unfair in the first place.

He also addressed the broader accusation head-on in a line that captured the sport's tone as much as the controversy itself: "I see some accusations out there that, you know, the rules are designed to favor me. Of course they are, you know." The remark underscored how often Larratt sits at the center of armwrestling's credibility fights, where one superstar's name can turn a rules debate into a referendum on the sport's standards.