The corpulent-looking Tyson Fury will need to start losing weight soon to prepare for his undisputed heavyweight championship fight against IBF/WBA/WBO champ Oleksandr Usyk on February 17th in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Today at the kickoff press conference in London, WBC heavyweight champion Fury (33-0-1, 24 KOs) looked like he’d been power-feeding with rich food since his questionable ten round split decision win over Francis Ngannou on October 28th.
It was initially thought that Fury’s management wanted to move the date of the Usyk (21-0, 14 KOs) from December 23rd to February 17th to give Tyson more time to melt off the excess flab that he’d gained since last December.
The way Fury looks, he appears to have been rewarding himself with food to celebrate his ‘victory’ over Ngannou. That’s a classic thing that some people do after accomplishing a big goal.
Ideally, Fury should be withholding his food intake and punishing himself for his inept performance against the novice Ngannou, but he seems to have things backwards in his mind.
But just looking at Fury’s physique, which closely resembled his 58-year-old dad John Fury’s square-shaped body, it’s painfully obvious that he’s been eating high on the hog instead of getting in shape.
Without Tyson beginning a weight program soon to trim off all the excess fat that he’s put on, he’s heading for a certain defeat against the speedy Usyk on February 17th, unless, of course, we get similar judging as Fury’s fight with Francis Ngannou.
It’s unclear if Fury’s trainer SugarHill Steward is telling him to eat to his heart’s content because he’ll use the weight to lean & maul the smaller, 220-lb Usyk, as he’d done in his fights with Deontay Wilder.
“That was a very tough fight for him. No one would expect that from Ngannou coming from MMA, boxing for the first time, and fighting the lineal champion, as he likes to call himself. Sometimes it happens,” said promoter Alex Krassyuk to Top Rank Boxing, talking about Tyson Fury fight against Francis Ngannou last October.
Usyk wants Fury to be in shape
“It’ll be the first time in the history of the heavyweight division that we’ll have four belts [at stake for Fury-Usyk]. This is history in the making, and if history is spoiled by an opponent to be out of shape, it’s a shame. So, we want him to be at his best,” Krassyuk said about Fury.
“That’s why we agreed to the new date [February 17th]. Usyk was already in camp, so we didn’t have to reschedule it, and here we are in London for the press conference to officially announce it. Then, after the official announcement, the fighter gets some extra motivation and sees the final date, and he works way harder than he normally does.
“This fight, like a lot of big fights in the history of boxing, also took quite a while to get cooked,” Krassyuk said about the Tyson vs. Oleksandr contest needing time to marinate.
Is Fury-Usyk the biggest heavyweight fight of this century?
“We are making a step here for February 17th, and I pray the fight happens with no one getting injured or nothing extraordinary takes place in the world. The whole planet will witness the biggest heavyweight fight of this century.
Krassyuk can’t be serious with his belief that the Fury vs. Usyk fight will be the “biggest heavyweight fight of this century.” This is nothing close to the biggest, as the interest in that match-up is embarrassingly low.
The British boxing fans are interested in the Fury-Usyk, but not the Americans, who see the two fighters for what they are. These are two old guys, who both deserve to be coming off losses.
Usyk was arguably knocked out by Daniel Dubois in the fifth round by a body shot last August but was saved by the referee, who inexplicably ruled it a low blow. Of course, there’s Fury with his controversial win over Ngannou in a fight where he clearly lost.
“We’re reasonable people. When you see a guy with a couple of cuts on his forehead, and he’s beaten up a little bit, and he went the distance and was knocked down, he could even be suspended by the commission by being knocked down for a certain amount of time,” said Krassyuk on why he agreed to move the date of the Fury vs. Usyk clash from December 23rd to February 17th.
“If Tyson said the fight was going on the 23rd, it would have gone on, but he did not. He didn’t because it’s dangerous for him. So, he will take his time to prepare, and we’ll have a much better fight. We want him to be in his best shape. It gives you no credit when you beat a guy like we saw in Saudi [against Ngannou].
