Peerless in his own era, Oleksandr Usyk would have held his own in any of them

The 42

4 days ago

SOMETIMES YOU JUST know what you're watching, don't you?
David Clifford. Lamine Yamal. Simone Biles. Patrick Mahomes, last Super Bowl aside. Antoine Dupont. Caitlin Thompson. Maybe not quite Scottie Scheffler, but let's leave that to Gavin Cooney in Portrush.
Those sportspeople who provoke those involuntary, guttural noises from the impartial observer. Those who drive us to send short, explicit messages of admiration into our group chats. Those who pass the eye test for peerlessness in their era.
'Blew his gumshield out like a PlayStation game,' was how one friend framed Oleksandr Usyk's brutal finish of Daniel Dubois while several of us watched agape action replays from Cork, Dublin, Britain, Barcelona and Australia.
That Usyk became a 'two-time undisputed heavyweight champion' with his fifth-round knockout at Wembley was a bit of a nonsense: he lost the IBF component of that claim via email in 2023, weeks after beating Tyson Fury to become the first heavyweight since Lennox Lewis to unify all the belts.
There was something altogether more pertinent about Usyk's victory over Dubois who, in the interim, had defeated Anthony Joshua to win the vacant IBF title. It was a spectacular reiteration by the undefeated southpaw that he exists on a plane above all of boxing's bureaucracy and bollocksology. It was a reminder that promoters can lobby a sanctioning body to free up one of his belts for their Next Big Thing but if that belt does change hands, it will only ever do so on loan.
That The Current Big Thing isn't even that big to begin with only adds to Usyk's lore.
As an amateur in 2006, aged 19, Usyk won a European Championship bronze medal as a middleweight (75kg) before moving up to light-heavy (81kg) in 2008 and, eventually, to heavy (91kg), where he won Olympic gold at London 2012. But heavyweight in the amateurs is still significantly smaller than heavyweight in the pros: Anthony Joshua took gold at those same London Games up at super-heavy (91+kg), the limitless weight at which Tyson Fury and Daniel Dubois also boxed throughout their senior amateur careers.
A year after his London gold, Usyk turned pro as a cruiserweight, which has the same cap (91kg/200lbs) as heavyweight in the amateurs. While cruiserweight doesn't have quite the same historical depth as the divisions above and below it — it was established only in 1979 as a bridge between light-heavyweight (175lbs) and the sport's increasingly huge heavies — Usyk scorched the earth under an unprecedented field of talent.
Advertisement
Between April 2017 and November 2018, the Ukrainian won six consecutive world-title fights in his opponents' respective backyards. He collected their cruiserweight belts like a bailiff and, in a solitary defence of his undisputed crown, ended Tony Bellew's career in Manchester.
With no more doors to darken at his weight, Usyk launched an even more daring conquest. For two decades, the heavyweight kingdom had been ruled by giants of men, nearly all of them six-foot-six-plus, 250-odd-pounders.
At six-foot-three and 200 pounds, Usyk was a David among Goliaths. But David slayed only one giant. Usyk has chopped them all down.
Over 70 combined professional fights, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua have found ways not to fight each other, each of them terrified by the prospect of losing to the other, their respective promoters equally petrified by the prospect of their golden goose losing its gloss.
Within his first seven fights up at heavyweight, Oleksandr Usyk clipped the geese's wings and then wrung their necks.
Giving up between three and six inches in height, between four and seven inches in reach, and between 23 and 55 pounds on the scales, the former cruiserweight champ beat 'AJ' and 'The Gypsy King' twice each. This chapter in heavyweight boxing history can no longer be known as the Tyson Fury-Anthony Joshua-Deontay Wilder era. It must instead bear Usyk's name alone.
And that name now belongs to a different conversation, one which stitches together the entire tapestry of boxing's blue-riband division: Usyk is an all-time top-10 heavyweight.
Some of the sport's traditionalists will reflexively reject the notion, believing his talent pool of opponents too shallow for Usyk to tap the likes of Sonny Liston or Rocky Marciano on the shoulder.
Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua, Daniel Dubois — whom Usyk has also now beaten twice — and the Ukrainian's first live heavyweight opponent, Derek Chisora, will be labelled bums by all those who say 'nay'.
The general trend in boxing discourse is that older is always better. The sport romanticises its bygone eras and lionises the athletes that illuminated them. There's sometimes merit to that line of thinking, but it can often be taken too far: Floyd Mayweather wouldn't have retired undefeated after a round robin with Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran and Tommy Hearns, but he probably wouldn't have emerged winless either.
And the reality is that heavyweight boxing boasts only a few golden ages in its back catalogue. Even if you were to disqualify the advancements in sports science and the general increase in size of human beings over the past century, a smaller Tyson Fury would have been sufficiently skilled to have become champion in virtually every decade outside of the '70s — and he likely would have challenged at least one of Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier or George Foreman. Fury's technical talent certainly supersedes that of many who took on The Big Three.
Joshua and Dubois, too, are powerful enough to have been at least low top-10 contenders throughout most of history, including the '90s wherein they wouldn't have troubled Lennox Lewis or Evander Holyfied or Riddick Bowe or Mike Tyson (at least early-'90s Tyson), but they certainly could have taken out Bert Cooper or Buster Douglas on a good day. Even Chisora, through belligerence alone, would likely have taken a scalp or two.
Truly great heavyweight talent has been sparse more often than it hasn't. Joe Louis, who may top even Ali as the best of them all, wasn't exactly blessed with routine tests of his credentials in the '30s and '40s, nor was Rocky Marciano who, with some regret, ended the career of his hero in 1951 for lack of a more commercially viable option.
Usyk shares a birthday with Ali and the idea of him competing in Ali's era requires fewer mental gymnastics than are needed to shrink down Fury or Joshua: at six-foot-three and with a 78-inch reach, Usyk's dimensions are also identical to those of The Greatest. He weighed on Saturday only three pounds more than Ali did for The Thrilla in Manilla. The Ukrainian is a throwback heavyweight in more ways than one.
His speed, footwork, and precision would have given even Ali himself — who boxed only twice against southpaws in his 61 pro fights — plenty to contend with. Indeed, Usyk would have given hell to most of history's great heavyweights for the very same reasons that make Ali such a wondrous boxer to observe more than five decades after his prime. Where technical acumen alone is concerned, Usyk isn't just an all-time top-10 heavy — he's top-two.
He also would have had his foils, just as Ali found in Ken Norton, as Joe Frazier ran into in George Foreman, or as Usyk's fellow cruiserweight convert Evander Holyfield discovered in Riddick Bowe and Lennox Lewis, each of whose cerebral boxer-puncher styles would have made for tough nights at the office for the Ukrainian.
But while the breadth of his achievements at heavyweight is narrower than many of the aforementioned, there is increasing cause to mention Usyk in the same breath as his iconic forebears.
He has in five years eclipsed anything accomplished by a heavyweight in the last quarter of a century. The speed, quality and enthralment with which he has rebranded his era is enough to suggest that he could have held his own in any of them.
Sometimes, you just know what you're watching.