By Erik Schmidt: In a stay busy fight, IBF #1 heavyweight contender Alexander Povetkin (15-0, 11 KOs) fights Taurus Sykes (25-4-1, 7 KOs) in a 10-round bout on July 19th at the Olimpyskiy Sports Palace, in Chekhov, Russia. This is a fight that isn’t expected to be a competitive one, nor is it planned on being one for that matter, as Povetkin, 28, is waiting around for a fight with IBF heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, which if everything goes alright (Wladimir doesn’t lose to Thompson this Saturday), then we should be seeing Wladimir take on Povetkin sometime later on this year.
Sykes, 33, is mostly known for his losses to Samuel Peter (a 2nd round TKO), Derek Bryant (4th round TKO loss), and a 10-round unanimous decision loss to Hasim Rahman in his last fight in June 2007. He’s got overall skills, but doesn’t have the power or the size, at 6’2″ 238 lbs, to compete with the better heavyweights in the division. In terms of size, Sykes is roughly the same size as Povetkin, yet he doesn’t have nearly the same excellent work rate or the heavy hands that Povetkin possess.
At 33, it’s not likely that Sykes will improve enough to be any better than he is at this time, and subsequently will find himself in deep trouble on July 19th when he meets up with Povetkin in the boxing ring.
Sykes did, however, look good in his last bout, taking the fight to an overweight Rahman, landing a lot of punches and making the fight much closer than the eventual lopsided scores that were handed out by the judges. I had the fight scored closer to a draw than 90-90 and 91-97, the scores that were given by two of the judges in the fight. However, Sykes seems to be lacking badly in the power department, which is probably why he’s come up short against the better fighters he’s faced in his boxing career.
Povetkin, a former 2004 Olympic Gold medal winner in the super heavyweight class, earned the right as Wladimir’s mandatory opponent by winning the IBF heavyweight tournament, defeating both Chris Byrd and Eddie Chambers.
With the win in the tournament, Povetkin was able to skip ahead and speed up his heavyweight shot at the title by as much as a year or more. Otherwise, he’d have likely had to wait for an extend time, and would have probably been luck if he could have gotten a shot at the title by 2010.
At 28, Povetkin appears to be arguably the best young heavyweight in the division, perhaps a lot better than any of the other young hopefuls coming up. His amateur career in which he faced many of the top fighters around the world, seems to have given him a lot of training and taught him how to deal with the faster, slicker punchers that he’s seeing now in the heavyweight division. In looking at him fight, you’d never guess that he has fought only 15 times, because he looks much more polished than a typical fighter with only 15 fights would have.
Again, that’s due to his excellent skills that he had to begin with, and he looked about as good as he does now even in his first heavyweight fight. The only thing that has seemed to change in the past four years, from what I can see, is Povetkin’s ability to fight longer periods without tiring. Judging by how exhausted he looked against both Byrd and Chambers late in those fights, it seems as if Povetkin is still working on building his up his conditioning, because he looked dog tired in both fights near the end.
Of course, a big part of that reason is because of the way he fights, in which he goes all out and throws a ton of punches in every round. This not only tires out his opponents, but seems to have a withering effect on Povetkin as well.