WHEN TYSON FURY ended the 12-year, 23-fight reign of consensus heavyweight king Wladimir Klitschko in November 2015, he became The Man Who Beat The Man.
Eight and a half years later, in a fight that evoked involuntary noises from us all, Oleksandr Usyk became The Man Who Beat The Man Who Beat The Man.
In case you’re wondering: yes, that makes Oleksandr Usyk ‘The Man’.
And where Wladimir Klitschko for years had his older brother Vitaly, or where Fury has had Anthony Joshua, Deontay Wilder and, more recently, Usyk himself, heavyweight boxing’s newest Man has no one who deigns to dispute his rulership of the division. Not since Lennox Lewis at the turn of the millennium has there been such a full stop applied to dialogue around the division.
What Usyk has achieved stretches the bounds of comprehension, not just because he has become the world heavyweight champion but because he was long considered too small to hang with the heavyweights in the first place.
As an amateur in 2006, aged 19, Usyk won a European Championship bronze medal as a middleweight (75kg) before moving up to light-heavy (81) in 2008 and, eventually, up to heavy (91) where he won Olympic gold at London 2012. Anthony Joshua took gold at those same Games up at super-heavy (91+kg), the weight at which he and Tyson Fury operated throughout their senior amateur careers.
Oleksandr Usyk celebrating with his Olympic gold medal in 2012. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Usyk turned professional as a cruiserweight and ran roughshod through the division’s richest-ever talent pool. Between April 2017 and November 2018, the Ukrainian won five consecutive world-title fights in his opponents’ respective backyards, collecting all four recognised world-title belts and punctuating his superiority by ending Tony Bellew’s career in Manchester in a solitary defence of his undisputed crown. There was little point in defending it for a second time: Usyk had obliterated the whole weight class.
His progression to heavyweight was less a leap of faith and more an actual leap. For two decades, the division has been dominated by a succession of six-foot-six-plus, 250-plus-pounders. Usyk, six-foot-three and moving up from the 200-pound limit, would be David in a realm of Goliaths.
David, though, slayed only one giant. Usyk has pucked the heads off a few of them, including the two best British heavyweights of their generation.
For years, and over a combined 67 professional fights, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua have been teasing fans with their Ross-and-Rachel act, their fight more often off again than on again.
Three of Usyk’s six total bouts up at heavyweight — indeed, three of his most recent four — have been against either ‘AJ’ or ‘The Gypsy King’.
Usyk ceded three inches in height, four inches in reach, and about 20 pounds in weight to Joshua in both of their meetings, almost stopping him the first time and beating him handily the second.
Against Fury on Saturday, Usyk was the shorter man by six inches, had the shorter levers by seven inches, and was almost 40 pounds lighter. Still, he out-thought and out-fought Fury and were it not for referee Mark Nelson subscribing to the Englishman’s mythos as boxing’s answer to The Undertaker, Usyk would have celebrated a stoppage in the ninth.
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Oleksandr Usyk celebrates with the Ukrainian flag. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
That brutal round exemplified Usyk’s greatness not only because he took Fury to Hell, but because he’d just clawed his own way out of there.
Usyk had been blowing out his arse only three rounds earlier.
His gameplan had been all about tempo. Fury’s physical dimensions typically allow him to establish a safe range from which he can completely dictate the pace of a fight. Usyk knew that his only chance at victory would be to narrow that range with his exquisite footwork and produce enough feints, body shots and overhand lefts that the gears in Fury’s head would go into overdrive, leading to more opportunities by way of his eventual exhaustion.
Usyk carried out this plot with surgical precision for the first three rounds. But by the turn, the scalpel was in Fury’s hand. The Gypsy King became more urgent, sewing shots into Usyk’s body — a weakness of his since the amateurs — and wobbling him with a right uppercut in the sixth. It looked like a case of when, not if.
If someone had told you at this point that Usyk would go on to have his hand raised, you would have… well, believed them. Because Oleksandr Usyk’s greatest strength lies not in his elite boxing arsenal but in something more intangible: an unparalleled conviction that he will manufacture a route to victory, regardless of circumstance.
With the fuel light on at the start of round seven, Usyk hammered the accelerator. Two rounds later, Fury was spinning all over the road.
Usyk’s ‘knockdown’ of the towering Brit — an eight-count is administered when the referee deems that a boxer has been held upright by the ropes — was ultimately the decisive factor in his split-decision victory. The fight would have been scored a draw without it.
Thankfully, judge Craig Metcalfe’s disgraceful return of 114-113 in Fury’s favour can be consigned to the lavatory of boxing lore. In years to come, we’ll remember only that when Oleksandr Usyk had his back to the wall, he rummaged through his pockets and pulled out a bazooka.
In victory, Usyk became just the third man after Jersey Joe Walcott (1949) and George Foreman (1995) to claim the world heavyweight title at the age of 37 or older. He may not have the longevity in the division to be considered an all-time top-10 heavy, but his overall body of work across two divisions — and as an amateur career, where he completed the set of major international gold medals — means that his name will forever feature in broader conversation about boxing’s true greats.
There was a broader significance to Usyk’s victory on Saturday night, too, which only elevates it as a heavyweight-title scalp for the ages. His country needed it.
Back home, Usyk’s meeting with Fury was framed not merely as a heavyweight title fight but as an opportunity for Ukraine to demonstrate its fearsome independence in the face of a far larger antagonist.
Usyk, who spent time on the frontline in 2022 and has lost close friends during Russia’s invasion of his homeland, had the weight of 38 million people on his shoulders and the memories of many more on his mind.
Think Katie Taylor at London 2012. Multiply it by five. Then square it. This was ungodly pressure for a sportsperson to withstand.
Usyk didn’t so much as creak. He didn’t get involved when Tyson Fury’s idiot father, John, headbutted a member of his entourage. He didn’t blink when Fury shoved him at the weigh-in. He didn’t unravel when his opponent blasted him to body and head between rounds four and six.
Indeed, Usyk offered only three reminders all week that he is, behind it all, endearingly human: he subtly punched the air after meeting his childhood hero — and fellow cruiserweight-turned-heavyweight great — Evander Holyfield. He wept when Michael Buffer anointed him the new undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. And he broke down again at the post-fight press conference when, in broken English, he spoke adoringly of his father, who passed away days after he won Olympic gold in 2012.
These are fleeting instances in which Usyk seems like a very normal man. He’s not, of course. He’s The Man. And his uncanny ability to remove emotion from the entire fight-week equation has been key to that ascent.
Usyk wipes away tears as he speaks about his father. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Tyson Fury, then, is the inverse of Usyk in nearly every way.
Fury lost plenty on Saturday night — his title, his undefeated record, possibly his nose — but his inexplicable survival of the ninth round added yarn to his legend. Fury has been down eight times as a professional. He’s been out twice. And yet he’s never been stopped.
For over a decade, the freakishly gifted Gypsy King has proclaimed that “no man born of his mother” can possibly defeat him. In all honesty, it was a fair shout until Nadezhda Usyk’s son moved up from cruiserweight.
The cold facts are that Fury fought mightily on Saturday night — he just didn’t fight well enough to beat Oleksandr Usyk.
There is no shame in that. Every great heavyweight champion in history not named Rocky Marciano took at least one loss. Several of the best heavyweights of all time — Jack Dempsey, George Foreman, Joe Frazier — weren’t even the best heavyweights of their respective eras.
Tyson Fury lands a jab on Oleksandr Usyk. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
By modern heavyweight standards, Fury’s CV is stellar: his win over Wladimir Klitschko and his seesaw trilogy with Deontay Wilder will forever precede him. His name will continue to be invoked long after he hangs up the gloves.
It won’t always be done so with fondness. The Gypsy King’s penchant for saying unbelievably stupid things continued apace during his post-fight interview when he suggested that the judges’ verdict in Usyk’s favour was rooted in sympathy for the new champion’s war-torn homeland.
Fury was naturally pilloried on social media but, crass as his sentiment was, it’s worth acknowledging that he had been swaying around the ring like an inflatable tube man not 20 minutes before he had a mic shoved in front of his busted nose. (He also wished everybody in the arena a happy new year).
We don’t interview rugby players who fail a HIA after enduring head contact on the pitch, so why are we interviewing a boxer after his brain has been rattled around his skull for 36 minutes by the fists of a 223-pound Ukrainian?
Perhaps to ask that question is to split hairs in a sport in which head trauma is not so much an occupational hazard as it is the occupation as a whole.
Usyk, 37, and Fury, 35, have extracted everything possible from their most dangerous day jobs, securing generational wealth for their families. They shouldn’t bother running it back, but they will.
Fury is rich but he’s also proud, and few boxers in history have been able to stomach the idea of bowing out as The Man Who Was Beaten by The Man.
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Oleksandr Usyk is The Man
WHEN TYSON FURY ended the 12-year, 23-fight reign of consensus heavyweight king Wladimir Klitschko in November 2015, he became The Man Who Beat The Man.
Eight and a half years later, in a fight that evoked involuntary noises from us all, Oleksandr Usyk became The Man Who Beat The Man Who Beat The Man.
In case you’re wondering: yes, that makes Oleksandr Usyk ‘The Man’.
And where Wladimir Klitschko for years had his older brother Vitaly, or where Fury has had Anthony Joshua, Deontay Wilder and, more recently, Usyk himself, heavyweight boxing’s newest Man has no one who deigns to dispute his rulership of the division. Not since Lennox Lewis at the turn of the millennium has there been such a full stop applied to dialogue around the division.
What Usyk has achieved stretches the bounds of comprehension, not just because he has become the world heavyweight champion but because he was long considered too small to hang with the heavyweights in the first place.
As an amateur in 2006, aged 19, Usyk won a European Championship bronze medal as a middleweight (75kg) before moving up to light-heavy (81) in 2008 and, eventually, up to heavy (91) where he won Olympic gold at London 2012. Anthony Joshua took gold at those same Games up at super-heavy (91+kg), the weight at which he and Tyson Fury operated throughout their senior amateur careers.
Usyk turned professional as a cruiserweight and ran roughshod through the division’s richest-ever talent pool. Between April 2017 and November 2018, the Ukrainian won five consecutive world-title fights in his opponents’ respective backyards, collecting all four recognised world-title belts and punctuating his superiority by ending Tony Bellew’s career in Manchester in a solitary defence of his undisputed crown. There was little point in defending it for a second time: Usyk had obliterated the whole weight class.
His progression to heavyweight was less a leap of faith and more an actual leap. For two decades, the division has been dominated by a succession of six-foot-six-plus, 250-plus-pounders. Usyk, six-foot-three and moving up from the 200-pound limit, would be David in a realm of Goliaths.
David, though, slayed only one giant. Usyk has pucked the heads off a few of them, including the two best British heavyweights of their generation.
For years, and over a combined 67 professional fights, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua have been teasing fans with their Ross-and-Rachel act, their fight more often off again than on again.
Three of Usyk’s six total bouts up at heavyweight — indeed, three of his most recent four — have been against either ‘AJ’ or ‘The Gypsy King’.
Usyk ceded three inches in height, four inches in reach, and about 20 pounds in weight to Joshua in both of their meetings, almost stopping him the first time and beating him handily the second.
Against Fury on Saturday, Usyk was the shorter man by six inches, had the shorter levers by seven inches, and was almost 40 pounds lighter. Still, he out-thought and out-fought Fury and were it not for referee Mark Nelson subscribing to the Englishman’s mythos as boxing’s answer to The Undertaker, Usyk would have celebrated a stoppage in the ninth.
That brutal round exemplified Usyk’s greatness not only because he took Fury to Hell, but because he’d just clawed his own way out of there.
Usyk had been blowing out his arse only three rounds earlier.
His gameplan had been all about tempo. Fury’s physical dimensions typically allow him to establish a safe range from which he can completely dictate the pace of a fight. Usyk knew that his only chance at victory would be to narrow that range with his exquisite footwork and produce enough feints, body shots and overhand lefts that the gears in Fury’s head would go into overdrive, leading to more opportunities by way of his eventual exhaustion.
Usyk carried out this plot with surgical precision for the first three rounds. But by the turn, the scalpel was in Fury’s hand. The Gypsy King became more urgent, sewing shots into Usyk’s body — a weakness of his since the amateurs — and wobbling him with a right uppercut in the sixth. It looked like a case of when, not if.
If someone had told you at this point that Usyk would go on to have his hand raised, you would have… well, believed them. Because Oleksandr Usyk’s greatest strength lies not in his elite boxing arsenal but in something more intangible: an unparalleled conviction that he will manufacture a route to victory, regardless of circumstance.
With the fuel light on at the start of round seven, Usyk hammered the accelerator. Two rounds later, Fury was spinning all over the road.
Usyk’s ‘knockdown’ of the towering Brit — an eight-count is administered when the referee deems that a boxer has been held upright by the ropes — was ultimately the decisive factor in his split-decision victory. The fight would have been scored a draw without it.
Thankfully, judge Craig Metcalfe’s disgraceful return of 114-113 in Fury’s favour can be consigned to the lavatory of boxing lore. In years to come, we’ll remember only that when Oleksandr Usyk had his back to the wall, he rummaged through his pockets and pulled out a bazooka.
In victory, Usyk became just the third man after Jersey Joe Walcott (1949) and George Foreman (1995) to claim the world heavyweight title at the age of 37 or older. He may not have the longevity in the division to be considered an all-time top-10 heavy, but his overall body of work across two divisions — and as an amateur career, where he completed the set of major international gold medals — means that his name will forever feature in broader conversation about boxing’s true greats.
There was a broader significance to Usyk’s victory on Saturday night, too, which only elevates it as a heavyweight-title scalp for the ages. His country needed it.
Back home, Usyk’s meeting with Fury was framed not merely as a heavyweight title fight but as an opportunity for Ukraine to demonstrate its fearsome independence in the face of a far larger antagonist.
Usyk, who spent time on the frontline in 2022 and has lost close friends during Russia’s invasion of his homeland, had the weight of 38 million people on his shoulders and the memories of many more on his mind.
Think Katie Taylor at London 2012. Multiply it by five. Then square it. This was ungodly pressure for a sportsperson to withstand.
Usyk didn’t so much as creak. He didn’t get involved when Tyson Fury’s idiot father, John, headbutted a member of his entourage. He didn’t blink when Fury shoved him at the weigh-in. He didn’t unravel when his opponent blasted him to body and head between rounds four and six.
Indeed, Usyk offered only three reminders all week that he is, behind it all, endearingly human: he subtly punched the air after meeting his childhood hero — and fellow cruiserweight-turned-heavyweight great — Evander Holyfield. He wept when Michael Buffer anointed him the new undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. And he broke down again at the post-fight press conference when, in broken English, he spoke adoringly of his father, who passed away days after he won Olympic gold in 2012.
These are fleeting instances in which Usyk seems like a very normal man. He’s not, of course. He’s The Man. And his uncanny ability to remove emotion from the entire fight-week equation has been key to that ascent.
Tyson Fury, then, is the inverse of Usyk in nearly every way.
Fury lost plenty on Saturday night — his title, his undefeated record, possibly his nose — but his inexplicable survival of the ninth round added yarn to his legend. Fury has been down eight times as a professional. He’s been out twice. And yet he’s never been stopped.
For over a decade, the freakishly gifted Gypsy King has proclaimed that “no man born of his mother” can possibly defeat him. In all honesty, it was a fair shout until Nadezhda Usyk’s son moved up from cruiserweight.
The cold facts are that Fury fought mightily on Saturday night — he just didn’t fight well enough to beat Oleksandr Usyk.
There is no shame in that. Every great heavyweight champion in history not named Rocky Marciano took at least one loss. Several of the best heavyweights of all time — Jack Dempsey, George Foreman, Joe Frazier — weren’t even the best heavyweights of their respective eras.
By modern heavyweight standards, Fury’s CV is stellar: his win over Wladimir Klitschko and his seesaw trilogy with Deontay Wilder will forever precede him. His name will continue to be invoked long after he hangs up the gloves.
It won’t always be done so with fondness. The Gypsy King’s penchant for saying unbelievably stupid things continued apace during his post-fight interview when he suggested that the judges’ verdict in Usyk’s favour was rooted in sympathy for the new champion’s war-torn homeland.
Fury was naturally pilloried on social media but, crass as his sentiment was, it’s worth acknowledging that he had been swaying around the ring like an inflatable tube man not 20 minutes before he had a mic shoved in front of his busted nose. (He also wished everybody in the arena a happy new year).
We don’t interview rugby players who fail a HIA after enduring head contact on the pitch, so why are we interviewing a boxer after his brain has been rattled around his skull for 36 minutes by the fists of a 223-pound Ukrainian?
Perhaps to ask that question is to split hairs in a sport in which head trauma is not so much an occupational hazard as it is the occupation as a whole.
Usyk, 37, and Fury, 35, have extracted everything possible from their most dangerous day jobs, securing generational wealth for their families. They shouldn’t bother running it back, but they will.
Fury is rich but he’s also proud, and few boxers in history have been able to stomach the idea of bowing out as The Man Who Was Beaten by The Man.
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