By Jim Maltzman: Vasily Lomachenko showed off his post-surgical scars on social media on Saturday of his operation to repair his right shoulder after last Monday.
Loma’s shoulder looked like someone took a giant stapler to it and punched through both sides. Talk about painful-looking.
Lomachenko, 32, is expected to make a full recovery and will be able to resume his career, according to his surgeon Dr. Neal ElAttrache, who performed the surgery last Monday.
The former WBA/WBC/WBO lightweight champion Lomachenko (14-2, 10 KOs) showed a tremendous amount of courage in fighting the gargantuan welterweight-sized IBF 135-pound champion Teofimo Lopez (16-0, 12 KOs) with the existing injury last Saturday.
Fighting with one arm, Lomachenko fought well enough to deserve a 12 round draw in the eyes of a legion of boxing fans. Instead of getting a draw, Lomachenko found himself on the losing end of a wide 12 round unanimous decision defeat by the scores 116-112, 117-111, and 119-109.
Lomachenko’s dad wanted him to postpone the fight
Because of the pain in his right shoulder, Lomachenko didn’t let his hands go in the first six rounds against Teofimo. When Loma did start attacking Teofimo beginning in the seventh, he banked round after round and was dominating the second half of the fight through the 11th round.
Nevertheless, Lomachenko had given away too many rounds in the first half of the bout, and couldn’t make up the difference.
Lomachenko’s injury to his right shoulder is the second one he’s suffered in the last two years. In 2018, Loma was operated on by Dr. ElAttrache following his knockout win over Jorge Linares.
Before Lomachenko’s fight against Teofimo, Loma’s dad, Anatoly, wanted him to pull out of the contest because of his shoulder injury. However, Lomachenko bravely stuck it out and fought the younger and bigger 23-year-old Lopez anyway.
“We lost one week of training. We lost one week of sparring because the doctor forbid him to do much for a week after the injection,” said Lomachenko’s manager Egis Klimas to ESPN.
“When he arrived to the States to prepare for the fight, he said in Ukraine he felt the sharp pain in his right shoulder.
“We took him right away to Dr. ElAttrache to examine him,” said Klimas.
The win for Teofimo resulted in him capturing Loma’s WBA/WBC Franchise/WBO lightweight titles to go along with his IBF strap.
No sympathy from Teofimo
Teofimo is now “the undisputed lightweight champion.” However, you can’t really call Teofimo the undisputed champion at 135 because he still hasn’t beaten WBC lightweight champ Devin Haney and WBA ‘regular’ champ Gervonta ‘Tank’ Davis. Until Teofimo beats them, he’s merely the IBF, WBA, WBC & WBO champion.
Teofimo didn’t want to hear about Lomachenko’s injury in the aftermath of the fight, saying “I was coming into this fight injured as well if you want to talk about injuries, but I didn’t make no excuses about it.
“I think that by him doing that, as someone who was considered the number one, pound-for-pound, best boxer in the whole world, to use that excuse, it just looks more bad on him than anything else,” said Lopez.