Rubio fails to make weight, will receive hefty fine

By Boxing News - 10/17/2014 - Comments

rubio888(Photo credit: Naoki Fakuda) By Dan Ambrose: Marco Antonio Rubio (59-6-1, 51 KOs) came in nearly two pounds over the weight limit for his title challenge against WBA 160 pound champion Gennady Golovkin (30-0, 27 KOs) earlier today at the weigh-in.

Rubio weighed in at 161.8 pounds, and missed the 160 pound limit by 1.81 pounds. Rubio will be fined $50,000 per pound over the limit. He had two hours to take off the weight, but he failed to do so. It’s unclear whether he made any effort or not. If so, it would be interesting to know how much weight.

The fact that he never came back to the scales means he’ll be fined for the 1.81 pounds over the limit. The upper limit to the fine is $100,000. Obviously losing that kind of money is taking a huge chunk out of Rubio’s purse for the fight. With the fine, Rubio will end up with $350,000 instead of the $450,000 he was set to make. That’s a pretty big chunk of Rubio’s money he’ll be losing due to his weight problems.

In addition to the lost purse money, Rubio also lost his WBC interim middleweight title. That’s even more valuable than the $100,000, because the fighter that holds that title will be in position to face either Miguel Cotto or Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in the near future if the winner of that fight doesn’t vacate the WBC middleweight title in order to avoid defending it.

The big question is how could Rubio’s trainer Robert Garcia let something like this happen. He should have been watching Rubio’s weight all this time in order to prevent this kind of thing from happening. Garcia has been in the boxing game long enough to avoid things like this, and this shouldn’t have happened.

When you’ve got a fighter in his biggest fight in many years, you’ve got to stay on top of the weight situation especially when you know he was scaling near the 175 mark just one month before the fight. They should have been able to get Rubio down to the weight limit without any problems, but obviously someone misjudged the weight.

Whether that was a case of their scale weight being different from the one that was used at the weigh-in or a situation where Rubio didn’t limit enough of his fluid intake during the last week is unclear.

The only thing you can hope for now is that Rubio didn’t drain himself too much trying to make the weight, because if he took too much weight off then he’s going to be useless tomorrow night when he gets in the ring at the StubHub Center in Carson, California to face Golovkin.



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