By Tim Royner: Dillian Whyte has revealed that Deontay Wilder was knocked out cold by former heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko in the past when he worked with him as a sparring partner. Wilder tried to rough Wladimir up, and he got caught by him.
In an interview with @SkySportsBoxing, Whyte says Wladimir, who at the time was a world champion, nailed Wilder with a big left hook and knocked him unconcious on the canvas. With the kind of power that the 6’6″ Klitschko (64-5, 53 KOs) had in his left hook, it’s not surprising that he knocked Wilder out.
In the same interview with Sky, Whyte says he was told to go home by Wladimir’s camp after he roughed him up in sparring. Whyte doesn’t say what he did to rough up Wladimir, but if it involved the kind of rough-house tactics we saw from him against Dereck Chisora and Joseph Parker, then it’s not surprising he was sent home.
Whyte trying to get under Wilder’s skin
It seems pretty clear that Whyte is doing whatever he can to try and get under Wilder’s skin in order to speed up his mandated title shot. Whyte earned the mandatory spot with the World Boxing Council to challenger Wilder for his WBC title last July by beating Oscar Rivas in a title eliminator. However, shortly after the fight, it was revealed that there was irregularity with one of Dillian’s drug tests. Whyte was later cleared by UKAD, but not until recently.
While the investigation was going on, the WBC replaced Whyte as the mandatory for Wilder with Tyson Fury. They then decided that Whyte will need to wait until 2021 before he gets a crack at Wilder. In the meantime, Whyte has kept busy with his career, but obviously he would like to get a title shot against the winner of the February 22 rematch between Wilder and Tyson Fury in the second half of 2020.
Whyte doesn’t give exact year or date of the sparring session between Wilder and Wladimir, but likely occurred 6 to 9 years ago. Obviously, Wilder getting knocked out before he became a world champion has no bearing on 2020, but Whyte is trying to score points with fans to irritate ‘The Bronze Bomber.’ Whyte isn’t happy that WBC heavyweight champion Wilder
Whyte gloating about Wilder being knocked out by Klitschko
“Wlad backs up, changes his footwork, feinting, feinting, jabs to the body, throws that feint jab, left hook. Wilder had his hands up, he was gone,” said Whyte to skysports.com. “It wasn’t no knockdown, he was knocked cold. Properly twitching as well.”
This sparring session happened too many years ago for it to be useful information about the present. If the now 43-year-old Wladimir waltzed into Wilder’s current training camp, and knocked him out cold, then that would be big news and bad a sign for him. But what Whyte is talking about is an episode that might have happened 9 years ago in 2011, and that’s too far back for it to have a bearing on the future.
I guess if we could take a time machine, and have the current version of Wilder travel back to the past to spar a younger Wladimir, it would tell us something. Other than that, it’s pointless and pathetic for Whyte to bring up a sparring incident from nearly 10 years ago.
Whyte bringing this old sparring story up now in 2020 won’t likely change his situation with Wilder. He’s STILL not going to get a title shot until 2021. Even if Wilder loses to Fury on February 22, Whyte is still going to need to wait until 2021 for his title shot.
Dillian Whyte: I’m not scared of Wilder
“A lot of people get intimidated by Wilder for the things he says, and the way he carries himself,” said Whyte to Sky Sports Boxing about Wilder. “I’m not scared of him.
“Listen, if you’re in the same weight division as someone, and you’re scared of them, go and get a job,” said Whyte. “You can’t be scared of these guys. The behavior that he does, and the things that he says about he wants to kill people, that stuff means nothing to me.
“It would be hard beating him, especially early doors,” said Whyte about Wilder. “In the early doors, he tries to move a lot and be tricky and cagey. But if you can take his right hand away, which as a fighter, I’d say is easy. You might think, ‘Ah, it’s hard to take his right hand away.’ But as a fighter, you know what to do. You look at these guys and think, ‘Okay, this guy has got power, and he’s fast,’ but I always find a way to damage these guys and hurt these guys.
“I think with Deontay Wilder, you’ve got to stay in his arms and stay in his right side, and hitting his body,” said Whyte. “You’ve got to be able to fight him at range and in close. A lot of people think it’s dangerous to fight him at range, but as a fighter, you can fight a taller fighter and use the range against them.”
Whyte wants to fight Andy Ruiz Jr., Povetkin or Wallin next
Dillian will be fighting in April, and he’s got Alexander Povetkin, Andy Ruiz Jr. and Otto Wallin on his target list. Povetkin, 40, is the one that has the best chance of meeting up with Whyte, depending on how the negotiations go.
Whyte needs to improve his conditioning for him to have a chance of beating Povetkin, considering how poor he looked in his last fight. Dillian is coming off of a harder than expected 10 round unanimous decision win over Mariusz Wach on December 7 in Saudi Arabia. Whyte won the fight, but he took a lot of punishment from the 6’7″ Wach, and he looked beaten up after the fight.
That was the third consecutive hard fight for Whyte, and he needs an easy one to give himself a break.