By Allan Fox: Former 2004 Olympic gold medalist for Cuba Odlanier Solis (18-1, 12 KO’s) will be continuing to take his comeback from a serious knee injury in a slow manner by taking on journeyman Willie Herring (14-11-3, 5 KO’s) in an undercard fight on the Tomasz Adaemk vs. Travis Walker fight card on September 8th at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey.

Hopefully the 6’1 1/2″ Solis will come in a little lighter than he did in his last fight against Konstantin Airich last May when Solis scaled in at nearly 270 pounds for his dominating 12 round unanimous decision win. Solis, never a strange to looking heavy, was especially fat looking in that fight, and it’s remarkable that his promoter allowed Solis to come into the fight in as bad a shape as he was given that Solis had recently come off of three separate knee surgeries dating back to his knee injury in his 1st round knockout loss to WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko in March of last year. By Solis coming into the Airich fight weighing 267 lbs, Solis was putting his surgically repaired knee at great risk. Solis would be such a good fighter if he could take off 60 pounds of lard to get down to around 200. Of course, he’d have to move down to cruiserweight but at least he’d be healthy enough to win titles and not put his knees at risk from carrying around all that blubber.

Solis has put on massive amounts of weight since winning the gold medal in the 2004 Olympics. At that time, Solis was a well defined 200 lbs, but he’s packed on a ton of weight since then, and regularly fights in the 250s to the 260s with much of it being fat. It’s hard to say what’s happened to Solis since he moved to the United States, but you have to wonder whether he’s visiting the refrigerator too often on a daily basis.

Choosing the 33-year-old Herring to fight is obviously being done to fine tune Solis’ game. Herring has lost eight our of his last eleven fights and won’t be much of a threat to Solis. However, at 32, Solis is going to have to get his game in gear and start losing massive amounts of weight and start facing better opposition.

Solis may get a break when WBC champion Vitali retires in the near future, because it will open up his title for Solis and other fighters to move in fight over it. But if Solis can’t get his way down below 250 lbs, he’s going to have major problems against the top contenders in the division.