Deontay Wilder says he wants to fight another three years before he retires, but Robert Helenius might accelerate that process by knocking him out this Saturday night at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
Wilder (42-2-1, 41 KOs) is limping into his 12 round clash against the hard-hitting Helenius (31-3, 20 KOs), having lost his last two bouts by knockout.
Getting beaten by Helenius by knockout could be the final straw for the Alabama native, causing him to hang up his gloves prematurely.
If Wilder can’t beat Helenius, it’ll remove any possibility of him getting another title shot in the next year, and it would put him in a position where he’d need to beat a contender like Joe Joyce or Filip Hrgovic to get in position to challenge one of the champions.
Helenius already knows what he needs to do to defeat Wilder, having studied his loss to Tyson Fury. Wilder can’t fight while backing up, and he does poorly when pressured by his opposition.
“Rotation for a minute and then light sparring, and then you harder and harder from there,” said Robert Helenius to Fight Hub TV about his disorientation training to get him accustomed to fighting while hurt.
“So that’s one type of balance training we do. Not that specifically,” said Helenius when asked if that type of training has built his conference for the Wilder fight.
“We’ve been doing everything in our power to be at our best. Deontay is American, and I’m a Finnish guy, so it’s going to be quite similar reaction in the crowd this time around.
“We live on a remote island where there are only 25,000 people living right now, and even my kids, they go to school where there are only 28, 36 people at school at the time. We live in a forest area with a lot of water.
“So we hunt a lot, we fish a lot, we cut our own wood. It’s nature living.
“It’s not that big of a deal,” said Helenius about his comment the other day about Tyson Fury creating the blueprint to unlock the key to defeating Wilder. “Of course, nobody had beaten Wilder before Tyson Fury. That’s what I meant by that.
“Of course, he [Wilder] hasn’t been brilliant on his backfoot in none of his fights. That’s probably why Tyson made a good fight about it when he pushed him backward,” said Helenius.