On Saturday Oleksandr Usyk defends his heavyweight status against an underdog with a punch
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On Saturday in Wroclaw, current heavyweight king Oleksandr Usyk will defend the International Boxing Federation (IBF), World Boxing Association (WBA) and World Boxing Organization (WBO) championship belts against a very specific opponent. The British Daniel Dubois, unlike his compatriot, the previous opponent of the Ukrainian Anthony Joshua, does not have a good “school”, but he has a terrible blow in terms of efficiency, helping him out in difficult situations.
The Wroclaw match was born on the ruins of a much more interesting battle. The status of the king among heavyweights Alexander Usik, the former world champion in the first heavyweight (up to 90.7 kg), won, having won two sensational victories in a row in 2021 and 2022 over his former owner Anthony Joshua, taking away the belt of the International Boxing Federation, the World the Boxing Association and the World Boxing Organization. And actually this summer he was supposed to fight for the fourth – the World Boxing Council (WBC), that is, for the title of absolute champion, with another insanely popular British boxer Tyson Fury. But in the negotiations on its organization, seemingly doomed, given the charm of the prizes at stake – image and money – to success, something went wrong, and the fight was at least postponed for an extremely indefinite period. Fury has already agreed on a strange duel with Francis Ngannou, who escaped from the UFC, the main promotion in mixed martial arts, and the WBA slipped his “regular” champion Daniel Dubois to Usyk.
Further, in theory, a set of platitudes should follow. Well, for example, about the fact that fate seems to specially throw one British boxer after another to Oleksandr Usyk for reprisals. He said goodbye to the previous category by winning against Tony Bellew. Then, having “warmed up” in the new category on the American Chazz Witherspoon, he defeated Derek Chisora and Anthony Joshua. And by the way, it never occurs to any of the experts to put Dubois in the sense of class next to these boxers. With Joshua, a remarkable athlete with all the skills expected of an elite heavyweight, which did not help him cope with the thin, cunning, agile Usyk, that’s for sure. Against the background of a compatriot, Dubois is slightly clumsy, without an intelligible background and, moreover, who has only recently healed a serious knee injury, looks terribly raw. What’s there: he looks like a classic victim, asking for a predator into the mouth.
But something makes you not to overdo it with platitudes. About Daniel Dubois, who is 25 and who is much younger than the 36-year-old Oleksandr Usyk, it would be more correct, apparently, to speak not as a “raw”, but as a specific boxer. Even his track record expresses specificity. He now has two dozen professional fights, exactly the same number as the invulnerable Ukrainian has. And in this list there is only one, in which the outcome had to be determined by the judges. In 2018, Dubois got the better of Kevin Johnson in this way. The rest ended ahead of schedule. Daniel Dubois lost ahead of schedule in 2020 to Joe Joyce, won all other fights ahead of schedule.
A clarification is needed here. Even in those he won, he missed threatening blows, sometimes a lot of such blows, but he invariably got out thanks to his own blows. “Classic” Dubois is his last fight. In December last year, he faced South African Kevin Lerena, who dropped his opponent three times in the first round (hence the knee injury). But the Briton somehow survived this beating and slowly came to his senses. And in the third round he already beat – and so well that the fight had to be stopped.
Daniel Dubois – and this is a thesis with which no one argues – a luxurious “shooter”. In modern boxing, few people know how to feel the timing of an attack so suddenly, to carry it out so suddenly. Another thing is that Dubois has so far demonstrated all his talents on opponents, who, in comparison with the mercury Oleksandr Usyk, look like convenient targets. But this does not negate the fact that in the sleeve of the “regular” WBA champion, for all his external clumsiness, a good trump card is hidden, forcing him to be treated differently than an ordinary outsider. So, for example, how does another well-known British heavyweight David Price relate. Trying to predict what might happen in Wroclaw, Price called Dubois the perfect “banana peel”. A harmless thing in principle, on which you can easily slip, crashing so that you can’t get up without outside help.
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