By Jason Kim: WBO middleweight champion Dmitry Pirog (20-0, 15 KO’s) has suffered an injury during training for his August 25th fight against WBA World middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (23-0, 20 KO’s) and won’t be able to make the fight according to Dan Rafael.

Steve Kim is reporting that Pirog injured his back while hitting a large tire with a sledgehammer as part of his training regimen. In doing so, Pirog suffered a slipped disc and will need at least three to four months to recover from the injury at the least. These unusual training routines have risks associated with them as we’re now seeing. In hindsight, it would have been better had Pirog stuck to the old fashioned training instead of implementing heaving a huge sledgehammer at an object that would cause it to bounce back.

This is bad news for boxing fans and really bad for Golovkin, because he was looking forward to this fight with a lot of anticipation to net his first big scalp in the middleweight division.

It’s unclear now when the 32-year-old Pirog will be healed from injury. Hopefully the fight can be salvaged for a later date. If not, then Golovkin will have to wait to get the winner of the unification bout between WBA Super World middleweight champion Felix Sturm and IBF champ Daniel Geale. Golovkin has been waiting his chance at fighting Sturm for ages now, and he’s ready to take him apart to kick him off his throne.

Zaveck to fight on Stieglitz-Abraham card

Former IBF welterweight champion Jan Zaveck (32-2, 18 KO’s) will be fighting on the undercard of the August 25th card headlined by WBO super middleweight champion Robert Stieglitz vs. Arthur Abraham at the O2 World Arena, Kreuzberg, in Berlin, German. Zaveck, 36, doesn’t have an opponent picked out as yet, but you can expect it to be fairly soft opponent because #4 WBO Zaveck wants to get another shot at a world title after losing his International Boxing Federation 147 pound title to Andre Berto last September in a 5th round stoppage. Zaveck was cut in that fight above his right eye causing the fight to be halted.

Since then, he came back and defeated Bethel Ushona in a poor performance last March. I saw the fight and had Ushona winning, but the judges gave it to Zaveck by the lopsided scores of 117-109, 118-109 and 119-110. I can’t see Zaveck being able to defeat WBO champion Timothy Bradley, although I imagine Zaveck would love to get a shot at him.