By Dan Ambrose: IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev (27-0-1, 24 KOs) gave his opinion of what he thought of Canadian fighters during Wednesdays international telephone conference call when he said that Canadian fighters are terrible.
Kovalev, 32, has a title defense this month on July 25th against Nadjib Mohammedi (37-3, 23 KOs) at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Mohammedi is the same guy that Nathan Cleverly easily beat four years ago in their fight in 2011. The fact that Mohammedi couldn’t beat Cleverly, a fighter that Kovalev obliterated in four rounds in 2013, gives you a pretty good idea what kind of fight the Kovalev-Mohammedi fight will be.
There’s not much interest in this fight from the hardcore boxing fans because they see Mohammedi as having zero chance of beating Kovalev.
“I don’t want to speak about Pascal because he does not deserve to get attention. He lost my respect for him even before the fight,” Kovalev said.” I cannot respect even his team. He is piece of [expletive]. Same as Stevenson. I think all fighters make terrible fighters in Canada.”
Kovalev didn’t say whether he thought the same about Canadian based fighters, because many of the top fighters in Canada are guys that came from other countries and who settled down in Canada for their boxing careers.
Fighters like Adonis Stevenson, Artur Beterbiev, Lucian Bute and Jean Pascal are all from different countries, but who came to Canada to fight. IBF middleweight champion David Lemieux would appear to be one of the few homegrown Canadian fighters, and it’s unclear if he’s going to be able to hold onto his IBF title for more than one or two fights at best unless he’s matched very, very carefully by Golden Boy Promotions.
Kovalev wants to fight some of the big names like Stevenson, and Andre Ward, but he’s in a place right now where he might not get those fights. Ward hasn’t decided if he’ll move up in weight to 175 yet, and Stevenson is fighting on Showtime. Kovalev wants Stevenson to agree to fight him on HBO, but it doesn’t look like he’s going to do that.
If Kovalev can’t get Ward or Stevenson, then the best he can hope for is a rematch against Jean Pascal, who he stopped in the 8th round last March, and a fight against Artur Beterbiev. That might be his best possible fight, even better than a fight against Stevenson in terms of competitiveness. Beterbiev already beat Kovalev twice while the two were amateurs in Russia.
I don’t think boxing fans want to see Kovalev fight Pascal again, but it might happen anyway simply because Kovalev doesn’t have anyone else to fight in terms of notable fighters.
Comments are closed.