Klitschko suffers biceps tear, fight with Pulev to be postponed

By Boxing News - 08/25/2014 - Comments

wladimir64By Scott Gilfoid: IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko (62-3, 52 KOs) suffered a partial tear in his left biceps last Friday while sparring. The injury will require for the 38-year-old Wladimir to rest for 4 weeks without sparring.

This means his scheduled title defense against IBF mandatory challenger Kubrat Pulev (20-0, 11 KOs) will be pushed back to November possibly later depending on how well the injury heals. Luckily for Wladimir, the injury won’t require surgery.

In some ways, it’s not really surprising that Wladimir suffered an injury, because with the way he’s been working out to get ready for the Pulev fight, it was only a matter of time before something happened. Wladimir had 15 sparring partners in came with him, which is obviously huge amount of sparring partners.

Wladimir recently added 2012 Olympic super heavyweight gold medalist Anthony Joshua to the camp as one of his sparring partners. There’s no word whether Joshua was in the ring with him when he injured his left biceps muscle. But with all the sparring partners, Wladimir appeared to be going beyond what he normally does for his training camps.

Sometimes more isn’t better especially when you’ve got a fighter approaching 40 like Wladimir. In hindsight, what Wladimir needed to do was take it easy and train as he always does, because his opponent Kubrat Pulev isn’t a big puncher and not real threat to beating him. The fight is basically going to be Pulev jabs vs. Wladimir’s power shots. I think we know pretty well who will win that kind of fight.

“He [Wladimir] had problems on Friday, and he first thought it’s a minor thing, but he went to the hospital near the camp [in Austria], and there they detected this torn muscle,” Bernd Boente, Klitschko’s manager, told ESPN.com. “He was in top shape and he had perfect sparring partners. He did a long preparation and is sorry to have to postpone the fight.”

The Wladimir-Pulev fight was scheduled previously for September 6th at the O2 World Arena in Hamburg, Germany. The fight was already sold out with 15K tickets already sold.

As for the sparring partners, they’ll likely be flying back home to wait until Wladimir’s arm heals. I mean, he can’t just have them hanging around for a month in Austria waiting for his arm to heal because there’s always a possibility that Wladimir’s injury could take more time to heal.

Boente is looking at November 15th for when he would like to reschedule the Klitschko-Pulev fight, but with injuries, he’s going to have to wait and see what happens.

When Wladimir does heal up and resume training, he really needs to take it easy because all of the sparring and training he’s doing could cause him to reinjure his bicep if he starts in immediately with his training. Ideally, Wladimir should take it easy on the sparring and just focus on hitting the bag and stretching to get ready for the fight.

Pulev doesn’t have the kind of power to really worry Wladimir like Deontay Wilder. We are talking about a guy that is strictly a jabber in 33-year-old Pulev. He can jab like no one else, but the power just isn’t there. Pulev is huge at 6’4 ½” 250+, but he just slaps with his power shots for some reason. It’s the strangest thing.



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