By Dan Ambrose: Former IBF/WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan says he didn’t want a rehydration clause for his May 7 fight against WBC middleweight champion Saul Canelo Alvarez because he wanted to get credit for beating him. Khan says that if he had insisted on a rehydration clause to keep the 25-year-old Canelo from ballooning up in weight after the weigh-in, then people wouldn’t give him the credit he deserves for beating him.
Khan says he wants to beat the best Canelo there is with him being as strong as he can. This could mean that Canelo comes into the ring in the 180s on May 7, and that would put the 160lb Khan in a situation where he would be giving Canelo a 20+ pound weight advantage.
That’s not a big deal to give away that kind of weight in the heavyweight division and still do well, but it’s a potential disaster to give away that kind of weight in the middleweight division. Khan and Canelo will be fighting at a catch-weight of 155lbs. But by the time Canelo finishes rehydrating, he could be as high as 185.
I hope for Khan’s sake that he doesn’t live to regret his decision not to insist on a rehydration limit to control how much weight Canelo puts back on after the weigh-in. If Canelo walks into the ring looking like a shorter version of the 180lb+ Sergey Kovalev, then Khan might be wishing that he had asked for a rehydration limit. There’s nothing wrong with keeping fighters from ballooning up in weight after they make the weight. It actually is helpful because it keeps fighters in the right divisions when you force them to keep from rehydrating. If I were Khan, I would have insisted on a 10 pound rehydration clause to keep Canelo from going over 165. Sure, it would have been tough on Canelo to keep from ballooning up into the 180s, but at least the fight would have been conducted on an even playing field. You wouldn’t have seen Canelo come into the fight looking like a little bull facing a lamb in the ring.
“Alvarez is one of the best fighters out there right now,” Khan said to IFL TV. “It’s a fight that is going to motivate me and make me want to train harder. I’ll be very strong at the weight. I walk around at 165 pounds I think Canelo might be 10 pounds heavier than me when he walks into the ring. If he’s going to be that heavy, I can’t stand there and trade with him because he’ll hurt me. I have to box with him with skills and speed,” said Khan.
Khan went on to say that he expects to be at 160 for the fight. He thinks that Canelo will be no more than 10 pounds heavier than him when he walks into the ring. The only that would happen is if Canelo doesn’t rehydrate into the 180s. Even if Canelo rehydrates to 175, it will gives him a 15 pound weight advantage over Khan, and that is a ton of weight. Khan would need to duplicate what Floyd Mayweather Jr. did to the letter for him to have a chance of winning the fight.
Mayweather fought Canelo in 2013 and beat him by a 12 round decision. But Mayweather used his A-side bargaining power to get Canelo to agree to melt down to 152lbs for the weigh-in. Khan can’t do that. He’s not the A-side in this fight. The one thing that
Khan has going for him in this fight is that Canelo still foolishly fights at 155lbs despite the fact that he’s putting on massive amounts of weight after the weigh-in. It’s pretty clear that Canelo should be fighting at the full weight at 160lbs for the middleweight division at this point in his career, and he’s doing little more than hurting his own body by continuing to melt down to 155 to fight at catch-weights.
When asked why he didn’t choose to have a rehydration clause in the contract with Canelo, Khan said “I didn’t do that. I wanted it fair and square when I beat him. I wanted to beat the best Canelo that was there, because I didn’t want people thinking I dehydrated him because I had a rehydration clause in there,” said Khan.
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