The weight for unified heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk was wrongly announced today at 233 1/2 lbs instead of the correct weight of 223 1/2 pounds at the weigh-in for his fight against WBC champ Tyson Fury in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Hopefully, the judges won’t make mistakes when scoring the Fury-Usyk fight on Saturday night at the Kingdom Arena. This isn’t a good sign.
Fury Fans in a Frenzy
In fairness, the announcer’s small mistake when reading the weights made many Fury fans worry about him fighting a bigger version of Usyk (21-0, 14 KOs).
Still, they should be worried because even a 223 lb version of Usyk could potentially stop the version of Fury we saw last October, with him soundly getting beaten by Francis Ngannou and saved by controversial scoring with the judges giving him a 10-round split decision in Riyadh. Talk about your return to the scene of a crime.
Usyk is big enough to defeat Fury because the Gypsy King’s last four fights have shown that he’s not the same fighter he was during the prime of his career in 2015.
Fury got away with murder in his three fights with Deontay Wilder, dodging knockouts in two of the fights with the referees not halting the contests, and deserving to be disqualified in the second.
Undercard weights
– Jai Opetaia 198.1 vs. Mairis Briedis 199.1
– Joe Cordina 130 – Anthony Cacace 129.8
– Agit Kabayel 238.5 – Frank Sanchez 238.5
– Sergey Kovalev 194.2 – Robin Safar 194.1
– Moses Itauma 239.1 – Ilja Mezencev 232.1
– Mark Chamberlain 132 – Joshua Wahab 132.1
– Daniel Lapin 174.7 – Octavio Pudivitr 173.7
– Isaac Lowe 125.5 – Hasibullah Ahmadi 127.7
Usyk’s All-Time Great Potential
“People who said he was crazy for getting in the ring with Deontay Wilder after fighting Sefar Seferi when he made his comeback. He did it and beat back the skeptics,” said DAZN Boxing analyst Chris Mannix about Tyson Fury coming back in 2018 after being out of the ring for 2 1/2 years, and gaining a ton of weight.
“Discounting Tyson Fury is a dangerous thing to do, and I’m sure he’s used to dealing with that kind of pressure. I just think the man in front of him might be an all time great. Not an all-time heavyweight. I’m not putting him in that box right now,” said Mannix about Usyk.
“I still don’t put him [Usyk] in the all time great heavyweights. He’s been a heavyweight for six fights. I think you got to have a deeper resume. I do think he climbs the list of the all–time great fighters because nobody will be able to say they were an undisputed cruiserweight and heavyweight in this four-belt era
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