By William Mackay: For those who witnessed last Saturday night’s fight between WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko and Juan Carlos Gomez, they saw a 37-year-old Vitali struggle badly in capturing a victory by a 9th round stoppage over Gomez. It wasn’t a pretty fight needless to say, but Vitali got the win and moved forward with his career. However, Vitali looked old fought like a fighter even older than his chronological years.
He fought much of the fight with his mouth open, laboring for air and looking more than a little tired. Gomez seemed to take a strategic fight plan of making the older Vitali work hard, expend a lot of energy and then hope to wear him out by the later rounds. I doubt Vitali was prepared to be pressured as hard as he was by Gomez, because he didn’t look ready at all.
Judging by his training with his famous trainer Fritz Zdunek, Vitali looked like he wasn’t being pushed hard enough to built up his stamina. Much of the training I saw was him pulling a sled, throwing some jabs in the air and doing a bunch of sit ups in a casual manner.
I didn’t see pain or heavy breathing, the kind that is required when a fighter is being pushed to the limits during his training. From my estimate, Vitali looked to be training at 60% maximum and wasn’t really putting forth enough energy to build up his stamina.
Fortunately for Vitali, the 35-year-old Gomez faded fast and wasn’t able to keep up the pace that he had set in the early rounds. From the 4th round on, Gomez did little other than charge Vitali, slapping at his gloves and wrapping him up in a tight clinch.
However, Vitali looked worn out as well, and I couldn’t figure out whether it was his lackadaisical training that was causing this or his advanced age. He certainly looked old to me. It looks as if he put a little hair dye on his graying hair, because I couldn’t see as much gray as before in his comeback fight against Samuel Peter.
You could see the gray still, but it was darker and more blended in, like he had done a bad dye job on his head. Anyway, his hair is the least of his problems. He needs to do something about how old he looked out there against Gomez.
I don’t know but maybe Vitali has seen his best days as a heavyweight, and from now on we’re guaranteed to see him fighting in an exhausted state, taking punches and looking really sloppy. Once Vitali is forced to fight hard for an entire fight, not just several rounds like last Saturday, I can see him losing. A young fighter like Chris Arreola, David Haye, or Alexander Povetkin are just the types that could expose Vitali’s creeping age and beat him up by making him work hard.
Haye is kind of a question mark, because he’s probably not going to get by Wladimir Klitschko if they do ever fight. However, Arreola and Povetkin are both young, have good chins and throw a lot of punches in every round. If Vitali is forced to fight as hard as he did in the first three rounds against Gomez, a period of the fight in which Gomez was coming at Vitali constantly, I can see Vitali wearing out and being stopped.
This happened in the Chris Byrd fight and that nine years ago. Vitali has aged a lot since then and isn’t the same fighter. You can imagine how he’d react now if he were to be pressured hard for 12 long rounds. He’d have issues by the 6th round and would probably self destruct.
Comments are closed.