By Allan Fox: In a battle of aging Polish heavyweights, 38-year-old former two division world champion Tomasz Adamek (50-4, 3 KOs) defeated the 47-year-old ring rusty Przemyslaw Saleta (44-8, 22 KOs) by a 5th round stoppage last Saturday night in a scheduled 10 round bout at the Atlas Arena in Lodz, Poland.

Saleta, who came into the fight having fought just once in the past nine years, opted to stay on his stool after the 5th. Referee Leszek Jankowiak stopped the fight at 3:00 of the 5th round.

It really wasn’t much of a fight. While Saleta was a decent but not great heavyweight 13-15 years ago, he’s not the same fighter he was back then. Adamek was able to nail Saleta at will with his hit and move technique all night long without getting hit much I return. Adamek looked very good, but it’s difficult to say he looked good because of Saleta being so bad or because he was showing that he still has something left in the tank.

Adamek came into the fight having lost his last two fights to Artur Szpilka and Vyacheslav Glazkov. Adamek doesn’t look like he’s improved any since those loses. The only thing that has chanced is he faced a weak opponent in Saleta.

When Adamek goes back to fighting the quality fighters at heavyweight, he’ll likely start losing once again. Adamek needs to move down in weight to the cruiserweight division because he’s too small to be fighting at heavyweight in my estimation. He can beat the journeyman level heavyweights and the flawed guys like Chris Arreola, Eddie Chambers, Travis Walker, and Steve Cunningham, but obviously can’t hang with the better heavyweights.

Adamek will be able to beat the 2nd tier heavyweights long enough to get a world title fight eventually against one of the champions, but his chances of winning that fight are slim. Adamek might have a chance against someone like Ruslan Chagaev or Deontay Wilder if he’s able to land perfectly. But Adamek would have to take a lot of heavy blows from those heavyweights in order to have a chance of winning.

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In other fights on the card, heavyweight journeyman Nagy Aguilera (20-9, 14 KOs) defeated Marcin Rekowski (16-2, 13 KOs) by a 10th round knockout. Aguilera obviously wasn’t supposed to win but he was dealing with a really beatable fighter in Rekowski. This was the biggest upset for Aguilera since his 1st round knockout win over Oleg Maskaev six years ago in 2009.