World Boxing Super Series: An unmissable semi-final line-up that proves real unification fights can happen
With four belts on the line in two world class bouts, the under-the-radar cruiserweight division is the perfect symbol of how the boxing landscape has changed
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Your support makes all the difference.Have you heard the one about the Ukrainian, the Cuban, the Latvian and the Russian? Four cruiserweight world champions, four unbeaten boxers, all in semi-finals of the World Boxing Super Series and all set to fight each other, even if it does sound like the start of a joke from the Seventies.
The four all breezed through their quarter-finals a few months ago, fighting under most radars and beating other boxers from the sport’s new world of boxing nations. The four enter this stage of the WBSS like a collection of highly-acclaimed writers all in search of the desired and deserved commercial recognition to accompany their talents.
“These are some of the very best fighters you have never seen,” said Richard Schaefer, part of the cabal of people responsible for putting the event together. Schaefer worked with Oscar De La Hoya, as his partner at Golden Boy, and behind the scenes with Floyd Mayweather during the last twenty years.
This Saturday in Riga a fighter called Mairis Briedis, who is 23 and zero with 18 ending quick, defends his WBC title against Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk, the WBO champion who is unbeaten in just 13 fights. The Arena Riga sold-out a long time ago for the Latvian idol, but he starts as a firm underdog in front of his 10,000 fans.
Usyk, you see, is probably the best fighter in the world that you have never seen or heard of. He won gold at the London Olympics and left behind a landscape of utter devastation in the old amateur game when he decided to lose the vest to pursue professional glory. He won the WBO title in Poland against the unbeaten Polish champion, stopped Berlin’s brilliant Marco Huck in Berlin in the quarters and now travels to Riga for another hometown masterclass.
Usyk is also 6ft4in and has talked openly about moving – he turned 31 last week – to heavyweight after he has finished his business in the foreign window of the cruiserweight division. Did I mention that he has a crazy haircut, they sing hymns to him in the Ukraine and that their national news recently featured him making an avocado salad for a border guard detachment in the east of his country.
However, the Breidis and Usyk showdown, which is the right word when two unbeaten world champions meet each other, is not even the best of the WBSS cruiserweight semi-finals. This is a division deep in dangers, surprises and obscurity.
At the Bolshoi Ice Dome in Sochi on 3 February the Russian Murat Gassiev fights Cuban defector Yunier Dorticos in a fight that is unlikely to last very many bells. Now, Gassiev holds the IBF title, has stopped or knocked out 18 of his 25 victims; Dorticos, who is known as the KO Doctor, is the WBA champion and so far he has stopped 21 of the 22 men he has beaten. It should be a fight that stops the boxing world for a few minutes when they walk to the centre of the ring. The final, incidentally, will take place in Saudi Arabia in May.
This unique quartet, with the financial backing of the various people behind the WBSS, have shown the slick-suited men, with their divisive strategies, at the sanctioning bodies and the slippery gallery of boxing power brokers that real unification fights can happen. It was a bold event to create and it fortunately found its fearless boxers, men prepared to take the risks in the ring and not in sideswipe tweets or with empty boasts in random digital outpourings.
In the Seventies and Eighties all four of the semi-finalists would have been dominant Eastern Bloc fighters, men with 500 and 600 amateur contests, gold medals, photographs with them hugging their leaders hanging on the walls in sad homes and just the love of their nation to fill their bank accounts. They are now richer and so is the boxing business.
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