Sergey Lipinets will fight for the IBF title with Sabriel Mathias

The famous Russian boxer Sergey Lipinets got a chance to regain the light welterweight title (up to 63.5 kg), which he did not hold for long at the end of the last decade. In August, he will fight for the title of the International Boxing Federation (IBF) with its owner, Puerto Rican Sabriel Matias.

The fact that an agreement was reached on holding a fight on August 26 between Sabriel Mathias and Sergey Lipinets was reported by ESPN. At stake in it will be the title of world champion according to IBF in the category up to 63.5 kg. It was vacant until February this year. Matias won it in a duel with Argentine Jeremias Ponce, knocking out an opponent in the fifth round. The news marks a rather unexpected turn in the professional career of 34-year-old Sergey Lipinets. It has so far only two dozen fights, but it already looks full of interesting events to the limit.

Born in Kazakhstan, but moved to Russia at an early age, former kickboxer Lipinets started it in the middle of the last decade and very quickly got used to the new genre. Spectacular style and a string of successes against strong opponents earned him the right to fight in New York for the vacant IBF junior welterweight title with Akihiro Kondo. In November 2017, Lipinets defeated the Japanese on points.

True, the Russian owned the title for four months. In March 2018, he defended him in a fight against the famous American Mikey Garcia, who moved to the Lipinets category from lightweight (up to 61.2 kg) to conquer the fourth division. The venture was a success. Lipinets tried to fight in his favorite way – through pressure, but Garcia coped with his attacks, once knocked down the champion and ended up far ahead on all three refereeing cards.

Soon after this misfire, Sergey Lipinets decided to change the category, moving to welterweight (up to 66.7 kg). In it, in 2019, he apparently won his most striking victory. Lipinets met with the American Lamont Peterson, who had two champion titles in different categories and a bunch of top matches in his biography. Peterson was quoted significantly higher than the Russian, but he had a magnificent fight in every sense – both tactical and technical. In the middle of it, Lipinets caught the American on a mistake and shook him with a powerful blow. Peterson never fully recovered, and in the tenth round he was finished off and immediately announced his retirement.

This spectacular knockout provided Sergei Lipinets with the opportunity to claim the title of interim IBF champion. But he failed to cope with the Canadian Castio Clayton – the fight ended in a draw. And in April 2021, Lipinets lost ahead of schedule, in the sixth round, to the American Jaron Ennis and put an end to the experiment with welterweight performances, going back to the first welterweight.

It seemed that it would take him a long time to get back to the top of his hierarchy. But circumstances and my own courage helped.

On August 20 last year, a major show was held in Florida. As its central event, a high-profile fight was announced between two American welterweights – Adrien Broner, who was compared in terms of talent with the great Floyd Mayweather, and Omar Figueroa. But Broner suddenly refused to enter the ring, citing “psychological problems.” Lipinets agreed to replace him, whose duel with Carlos Portillo, which had no particular value, was listed on the undercard program. As a result, Lipinets impressed the audience by convincingly dealing with an extremely strong opponent. Already in the second round, Figueroa found himself in a knockdown, and in the eighth, the seconds, seeing his deplorable state, refused to continue the match.

So Sergei Lipints got the WBC Silver belt, which guarantees fairly high places in the ranking. And now there is also a chance to fight for a much more prestigious title with a boxer that is quite in demand among the public. In Russia, Sabriel Mathias, however, is most likely known in connection not with his undoubted sporting successes, but with the tragedy that once shook the world of boxing.

In July 2019, in the American city of Oxon Hill, the status of a contender for the IBF title was contested by Sabriel Matias and domestic fighter Maxim Dadashev. Dadashev’s coach Buddy McGirt, despite the boxer’s protests, withdrew him from the fight at the end of the 11th round, noting that Dadashev was already poorly versed in what was happening. After leaving the ring, the Russian lost consciousness, and in the hospital it turned out that he had suffered a brain hemorrhage. The emergency operation did not help – a few days later Dadashev died, and his death provoked another wave of discussions about security measures in professional boxing.

Alexey Dospekhov