By Dimitriy Tarakan: Unbeaten middleweight contender David Lemieux (25-0, 24 KO’s) mixes it up with the hard hitting Mexican Marco Antonio Rubio (49-5-1, 42 KO’s) on Friday night in a WBC middleweight eliminator bout at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada.

The winner of this fight becomes the mandatory challenger for the winner of the June 4th bout between WBC middleweight champion Sebastian Zbik and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. If Lemieux beats Rubio on Friday, he’s probably going to need a little luck in order to get a quick shot at the Chavez-Zbik winner.

If Chavez Jr. beats Zbik, we’ll likely not seeing Lemieux getting a chance at fighting Chavez Jr. anytime soon because Chavez Jr. will probably be steered away from Lemieux so that Chavez Jr. can milk the WBC title against either beatable fighters or possibly an in house fight against Miguel Cotto. Ricardo Mayorga would like to fight Chavez Jr., but that’s a fight we’ll likely not be seeing because Mayorga is dangerous and would have a good chance of knocking Chavez Jr. out and messing things up for a future bout against Cotto.

It’s unknown how the 22-year-old Lemieux will do against Rubio on Friday, because Lemieux has been matched pretty soft during his four year pro career. Rubio can really punch and if he survives long enough to test Lemieux’s chin, we could see an upset. Lemieux gets most of his knockouts early, so the tricky part is for Rubio to get past the first six rounds and look to drown Lemieux in the second part of the fight when he’s not as fresh and powerful.