Sergey Kovalev is not allowed to take weight – Newspaper Kommersant No. 55 (7500) of 03/31/2023

In the career of the famous Russian boxer Sergei Kovalev, who once held the world light heavyweight title (up to 79.4 kg) and was awarded the status of the best fighter of the year, and at a veteran age decided to try to win the title in the first heavyweight category (up to 90.7 kg), another slip occurred. Already sanctioned by the World Boxing Council (WBC), Kovalev’s qualifying fight against the famous South African Tabiso Mchunu fell through due to low “television interest”. Now the Russian will have to wait a long time for a chance to hold a championship fight.

The fact that Sergey Kovalev refused to fight with Tabiso Mchunu was reported to the Fight Freaks Unite resource by the promoter of the Russian boxer Kathy Duva. According to her, the reason for the breakdown was the “lack of television interest” in the fight. Duva added that now Kovalev’s representatives are looking for “other opportunities.”

We are talking about another rather unpleasant turn in the exciting career of Sergei Kovalev. In the past decade, he was one of the brightest stars in professional boxing. The Russian has earned a reputation as a phenomenal puncher, held the light heavyweight title for a long time in various versions, losing and regaining it, and received several prestigious individual awards, including even the award for the best boxer of the year regardless of weight category in 2014 from The Ring, whose classifications are the most authoritative (he got it after a confident victory over the American legend Bernard Hopkins).

However, then something like a long black stripe appeared in the sports biography of Sergey Kovalev. In November 2019 he Meets with the Mexican Saul Alvarez, unanimously recognized at that moment as the best fighter in the world, who jumped from middleweight to light heavyweight for the fight with Kovalev. In 2022 Alvarez lost another Russian light heavyweight, World Boxing Association (WBA) champion Dmitry Bivol, but that match, which caused a huge stir, ended with the defeat of the domestic boxer by knockout in the 11th round and the loss of the title of the World Boxing Organization (WBO).

It was assumed that Sergey Kovalev would soon hunt for the championship belt again, but at first the coronavirus pandemic disrupted his fight against the Cuban Sullivan Barrera, and then Kovalev got into a very unpleasant story. In January 2021, he was supposed to fight Uzbek boxer Bektemir Melikuziev. But just before the match, it turned out that banned synthetic testosterone was found in Kovalev’s doping test.

Sergey Kovalev was lucky that anti-doping sanctions in professional boxing are much softer than in Olympic sports. However, in any case, the break in his performances turned out to be colossal – almost two and a half years.

Usually such a period is associated with the inevitable loss of tone. But Kovalev, despite his veteran age (he will turn 40 in April), not only did not refuse to continue his career, but decided on a rather bold step. He moved from light heavyweight to first heavyweight.

The debut in the new category for Sergey Kovalev turned out to be quite successful. In May last year, he defeated Bulgarian Tervel Pulev in an extremely convincing manner on points. The expectation of rapid advancement to the top of the category hierarchy was also justified. And at the beginning of the current year, the WBC sanctioned the fight between Kovalev and Thabiso Mchunu, a famous South African boxer who had previously contested the title, assigning the match a qualifying rank, that is, identifying a contender for the belt. In fact, the WBC clarified that the winner of the bout would still have to wait, because the structure had pre-planned a fight between the title holder Sweden’s Badu Jack and Germany’s Armenian Noel Mikaelyan. But the wait would probably be short. And after the failure of the fight between Kovalev and Mchunu, it will definitely drag on – perhaps, given the age of the Russian, even critically.

Alexey Dospekhov