With Oleksandr Usyk announcing he is to relinquish his three (WBC, WBA, WBO) heavyweight titles it throws the division into flux.
Those who have followed recent history will know it took 25 years, between Lennox Lewis beating Evander Holyfield in 1999 and Usyk outpointing Tyson Fury in 2024, to resolve the previous mess. Let’s hope it doesn’t take that long to sort out this time.
The good news: A big reason for the 25-year wait was the Klitschko brothers essentially ruling the roost for more than a decade. As siblings, they were never going to fight each other so unless Karol Itauma reinvents himself as a top heavyweight, there are currently no such brothers to worry about. Furthermore, Turki Alalshikh is a big fan of the heavyweight division and will be keen, presuming he retains his unofficial position as the sport’s puppet master, to match the best against the best.
The reasonable news: We have one established beltholder already and that’s Daniel Dubois, who holds the WBO strap.
The middling news: The WBA have long seen the sense in having two beltholders so Murat Gassiev, the ‘regular’ champion and like Dubois a former Usyk victim, is already reported to have been elevated to ‘super’ champion. He will defend against Tony Yoka on July 11. Moses Itauma is the leading WBA contender.
The WBC are not as brazen as the WBA in awarding multiple ‘world’ titles but they do have an interim champion, Agit Kabayel. WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman will decide if the German will be upgraded to full champion or if he’ll need to contest the vacant strap. The leading contender is Fury. Whether the Englishman would deem a title fight with Kabayel more valuable than a career-high payday versus Anthony Joshua remains to be seen. Lawrence Okolie is currently second, but has a PED case hanging over him. Itauma and Filip Hrgovic are third and fourth respectively and fight on August 29, Joshua is fifth, Sanchez is sixth, and former champion, Deontay Wilder, is seventh.
The bad news: For those who like having one champion per division, and will only recognise one champion on the condition they hold all four sanctioning body titles, it’s going to be a long (but presumably not 25-year) wait. The IBF belt will now be vacant and there isn’t an obvious contest to fill it. Leading the way at No. 1 in those rankings is Frank Sanchez but the second spot is vacant. Itauma (third) and Hrgovic (fourth) follow before we get to Joshua (fifth) and Bakhodir Jalolov (sixth).
