Heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk has picked Tyson Fury to beat Anthony Joshua if the two should ever meet in the ring.
Usyk made his comments while speaking to the podcaster Zach Hirsch earlier this week. During the conversation, Usyk – who has defeated both Joshua and Fury twice – said that he wanted a third fight with Fury to cap off his career. Usyk is currently set to face Daniel Dubois at Wembley Stadium in a rematch of their 2023 fight in Wroclaw, Poland.
Usyk said of who would win between the two former champions, who are yet to meet in the ring: “I think it’s Tyson Fury. He’s a bigger man, a smart guy.”
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Usyk also talked about the controversy around his first fight with Daniel Dubois. In their first encounter, an errant blow from Dubois in the fifth round put the Ukrainian on the canvas for some minutes. Despite a ruling from the referee that that punch landed beneath Usyk’s beltline, the controversy arising from it has become an angle in the runup to the rematch.
It is a controversy that first began to be stoked immediately after the fight. Dubois, who lost by ninth-round knockout, did not attend the post-fight press conference, leaving because his promoter Frank Warren said he was too distraught.
That night, Warren said that he and Dubois’s camp were going to push for the rematch. That would be their aim, he said, if a planned appeal with the authorities did not result in a no-contest.
He said: “No cry-baby stuff. Fine. We’re here, and all we want is a fair shake. And we didn’t get it. We didn’t get it at all. But we could go on about it all night long. What is going to happen is I’ve said, and I’m confident that once all the evidence is reviewed and so forth, they will declare a no-contest or a rematch.”
Dubois, also, immediately registered his unhappiness at the turn of events. In a BBC interview he gave a day later, he said that he still thought the blow was legal.
He said: “I’ve seen it. I looked at it, and, you know, I was there. I threw that shot and I threw it perfectly, smack, into his stomach. They just cheated out of it. The referee didn’t call it, and there was just confusion at the time.
“I just became disheartened, and I lost momentum after that. This is a blatant shot. I told the referee I caught him. It wasn’t low.”
He added: “And the referee didn’t even say like it was low. [Usyk] was holding his stomach. He wasn’t going to make it in time. He was out. That should have been a knockout, and I think you know that this needs to go further.
“It needs to be pushed and this wrong needs to be corrected because I should be a world champion right now.”
An immediate rematch did not emerge. Instead, Dubois would go on to face Jarrell Miller and Filip Hrgovic in fights in Riyadh, winning both before defeating Anthony Joshua at Wembley Stadium last September for the IBF portion of the world title.
Two years on from their original match, Usyk said this week that the controversy had not given him any motivation for the fight.
Usyk said: “I don’t have motivation. I have discipline. The low blow in the first fight is in the past. Now, I have new—I live in today, I live in the present. I don’t know what’s in the future and the past is, ‘Bye! Bye!’ We have time today so we must live now.”
