Dmitry Bivol will defend his championship title in a fight with Lyndon Arthur

This year in professional boxing will end with a grand December show in Saudi Arabia. As part of it, several celebrities will enter the ring, including heavyweights Anthony Joshua and Deontay Wilder, as well as Russian light heavyweight (up to 79.4 kg) Dmitry Bivol. Recognized by many resources as the best boxer of last year, he will defend the World Boxing Association (WBA) championship in a fight against the experienced Briton Lyndon Arthur.

ESPN and a number of other sources reported that a boxing tournament will take place in Riyadh on December 23, which in terms of the volume of names involved in it will be one of the largest in history. The December show will be a kind of replacement for another one, which was canceled on an emergency basis. On this day in Saudi Arabia, which has recently become interested in boxing and has been investing colossal amounts of money in the performances of stars, it was planned to hold a match, doomed to cause incredible excitement, for the title of absolute world heavyweight champion between the British Tyson Fury, who owns the World Boxing Council (WBC) belt, and Ukrainian Alexander Usik, who owns the belts of the World Boxing Association, the International Boxing Federation (IBF) and the World Boxing Organization (WBO). However, the fight had to be postponed. At the end of October, Fury had a very difficult fight with the former champion of the UFC, the main promotion in mixed martial arts, Francis Ngannou, in which he won, surviving a knockdown and receiving quite serious injuries. They forced the Briton to take a break to recover. Presumably, the fight between Fury and Usyk will take place on February 17.

The program of the December show is unique, since several celebrities will take part in it, who are waiting for important fights. Formally, the centerpiece of it will be two heavyweight fights – Briton Anthony Joshua and American Deontay Wilder. They are united by the fact that it was Alexander Usyk and Tyson Fury who took away the championship titles from them. At the same time, both Joshua and Wilder, given the brightness of their biographies and popularity, remain at the forefront of the queue for the right to fight the winner of the match between Fury and Usyk. And in order not to fall in the rankings, they need to work well in December matches against opponents who, at least, do not look absolutely passable.

Anthony Joshua’s favorite Swede, Otto Wallin, who defeated the famous Russian heavyweight Murat Gassiev in September in a bitter fight, has only one defeat in his career. And even then it is rather honorable. In 2019, Wallin caused a lot of problems for Tyson Fury. As for New Zealander Joseph Parker, Deontay Wilder’s opponent, his record includes many fights with elite opponents, and in the middle of the previous decade he even won the WBO championship belt, losing it when he crossed paths with Joshua.

Anthony Joshua could regain his title very soon. The fact is that the IBF has already warned Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usik that if they activate the rematch clause in the contract, the structure will regard this as an evasion of mandatory protection and will deprive one of the boxers of his title, declaring it vacant. One contender is Croatian Filip Hrgovic, the official IBF challenger. He will also fight in Riyadh – with 41-year-old Australian veteran Mark De Mori. The second will probably be Joshua, who occupies third position in the IBF classification, unless, of course, he misfires in the fight with Wallin.

But for Russia, the most interesting fight is what is called the main one on the “undercard.” This is the return to the ring after a rather long break of one of the brightest domestic boxers – Dmitry Bivol.

2022 turned out to be a fantastically successful year for him thanks to two victories. In May, Bivol confidently dealt with Mexican Saul Alvarez, who at the time of the meeting with him occupied the top line of the best fighters, regardless of weight category, in all major independent classifications. And in November, Bivol again defended his WBA title, leaving no chance for his extremely strong Mexican opponent, Gilberto Ramirez. There is nothing strange that the same ESPN recognized the Russian light heavyweight as the strongest boxer of the year.

The pause in Dmitry Bivol’s performances is connected, according to sources, largely with difficulties in organizing his fights due to the tough position taken by some boxing structures towards Russian representatives against the backdrop of a military special operation in Ukraine. So, probably for this reason, it is impossible to arrange a fight, which Bivol himself has repeatedly called his priority goal. We are talking about his match with compatriot Artur Beterbiev, who has collected the WBC, IBF and WBO titles.

Instead of a top fight without any reservations, Dmitry Bivol will hold a fight in December that can be considered a top fight only with reservations. Still, Lyndon Arthur is not a professional boxing superstar, even though his track record looks impressive. There is only one loss for every 23 wins. His Arthur suffered a knockout in December 2021 from another Briton, Anthony Yarde. It was a repeated fight between the rivals, and in the first one Lyndon Arthur took the upper hand.

But the details matter. With the exception of Yarde, who was destroyed by Artur Beterbiev in January, Lyndon Arthur has never crossed paths with truly dangerous opponents. The lion’s share of those he defeated were boxers whose names mean nothing to fans of the sport. Experts also assess its potential very modestly. Let’s say that in the BoxRec light heavyweight ranking, Arthur is now in 14th position.

Alexey Dospehov