By Matt Stein: You ever wondered why WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko (36-2, 35 KOs) wasn’t so thrilled at fighting Juan Carlos Gomez? It has to do with the Cuban’s style. Being a crafty southpaw with a lot of speed and excellent defensive ability, Gomez is a nightmare for a big lumbering heavyweight like Vitali, who mostly likes to fight slower opponents that stand directly in front of him.
That’s the exact opposite type of fighter that Vitali will be facing on Saturday night in Stuttgart, Germany. Gomez (44-1, 35 KOs) has made a career out of making his opponents look bad, breaking their spirit with his speed and elusiveness and causing them to give up on themselves in the process.
Gomez certainly hasn’t beaten the same types of fighters that Vitali has, but to be honest about it, Vitali’s ring record isn’t all that impressive when you strip away all the fluff fighters, which accounts for roughly 98% of all his opponents to date.
Being a southpaw, Gomez is like a younger, faster, stronger version of Chris Byrd. And for those who haven’t connected the dots yet, he’s the fighter that forced Vitali to quit in the ring in their fight in their fight in April 2000.
All it took for Byrd to get Klitschko to quit was to pick off his hard shots, make him expend a lot of energy, lean away from his shots and then take the fight to him in the later rounds when Vitali exhausted himself. It wasn’t exactly a genius plan on Byrd’s fight, because anyone who has fought a huge fighter like Vitali knows that the bigger they are, the more likely they tire out fast.
In the case of Vitali, if he’s forced to hit a lot of air, and pressured to a certain extent, he wears out like a fading battery. The trick is to get him to start missing, to pick off his punches in midair and make him work hard for the full three minutes of every round instead of letting him dictate the pace of the fight.
If Gomez lets Vitali paw away at him with jabs and right hands, it’s going to be an easy night for Vitali. That’s not how Gomez fights, and Vitali, who fought along side him at when he boxed with Universum in Germany, is well aware of that.
This is perhaps why Vitali is trying hard to pschye Gomez out in the prefight buidup in the past couple of weeks. The theory would be that if Vitali could anger Gomez enough, the Cuban would be more likely to get away from his normal defensive counter-punching style of fighting and make the mistake of trying to take the fight to Vitali.
Now, that would be playing into Vitali’s hands. Don’t get me wrong, Gomez does need to pressure Vitali somewhat, but he needs to do it by moving around the ring and forcing Vitali out of position so that Gomez can hit him when he’s not in position to defend against him.
When you have a fighter as big as the 6’7” Vitali, you have to use speed and movement to make him move his large body and use up energy. He won’t be able to maneuver nearly as well as the smaller, quicker Gomez, and he probably knows that.
But Vitali is hoping that he’ll be able to catch Gomez with something big while the Cuban is moving around. That’s not likely to happen, because Vitali’s accuracy had never been good and with an opponent that’s moving around like Gomez will be doing, it will be even worse.
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