Oleksandr Usyk will be coming off a year layoff to defend his IBF, WBA & WBO heavyweight belts against what many boxing fans feel is the undeserving Daniel Dubois on August 26th in the 45,000-seat Wroclaw, Stadium in Poland.
Usyk-Dubois will reportedly be shown live on TNT Sports pay-per-view in the UK. Oleksandr, 36, is popular in the UK, but Dubois is arguably much less so, partly because of his weak resume but also the way he quit on one knee against Joe Joyce in the 10th round in November 2020.
Dubois earned the fight with Usyk by beating WBA ‘regular’ heavyweight champion Trevor Bryan by a fourth round knockout in June 2022. Bryan had captured the WBA belt in 2021, knocking out 42-year-old Bermane Stiverne.
If Dubois beats Usyk, we could see him facing WBC heavyweight champion Tyson Fury next. Dubois would be doing Fury a huge favor by defeating Usyk because that’s a bad style match-up for the 6’9″ Gypsy King. It would also be an easier fight to negotiate because Fury & Dubois because both are with Queensberry.
UK fans would have forgotten about that performance by Dubois if he’d fought some good opponents since, but he’s been fed these four lesser fighters in record-padding fights since that fight:
- Kevin Lerena
- Bogdan Dinu
- Trevor Bryan
- Joe Cusumano
It’s unknown what the PPV price will be for the event, but it’s whatever the organizers feel the market will bear. It’s unlikely the event will be as costly as an Anthony Joshua event, but you never know.
The hulking 6’5,” 250-lb Dubois (19-1, 18 KOs) came close to being knocked out by the much smaller 6’1″ South African Lerena, getting dropped three times in the first round and somehow not being stopped by the VERY patient referee Howard Foster.
Dubois fans point out that the reason he was dropped three times by the southpaw Lerena is he injured his right knee during the first knockdown, and that may be a legitimate excuse.
But that doesn’t account for the first knockdown in the round. Lerena dropped Dubois hard with a left to the head that had him hurt enough to go down.
Lerena could have finished the job in the second, as Dubois was still highly vulnerable, but he stopped punching and let the younger fighter have at it. In the third, Dubois knocked out Lerena to save his shaky career.
It’s not the fight that fans had hoped to see from the unbeaten three-belt champion Usyk (20-0, 13 KOs), but his tries at setting up the undisputed championship bout with WBC champion Tyson Fury went nowhere after the Gypsy King made negotiated himself out of the fight.
With Usyk coming off a year layoff since his win over Anthony Joshua in their rematch in August 2022, we don’t know what we’ll see from the 36-year-old Ukrainian. It’s a long time for a fighter to be coming out of action, but Usyk is an older fighter and a lot smaller and weaker than Dubois.
If Usyk loses this fight to Dubois, his dreams of an undisputed clash against Fury will have been dashed, and fans will likely have to suffer through a Fury-Dubois contest on the undercard of Anthony Joshua vs. Deontay Wilder in December.
