Bivol is Canelo’s most challenging adversary since Gennady Golovkin in 2017 which ended in a dispute about judging
Saul Canelo Alvarez, the man who commands $50million a fight and boxing’s current pound-for-pound champion, returns to the ring in Las Vegas on Saturday – yet all eyes are likely to be trained on the three men sat to the side of the ring.
Canelo, who in Dmitry Bivol faces his most challenging adversary since Gennady Golovkin in 2017, might well go twelve rounds and this could end up as a tense, close affair. And that could spell bad news for his now-promoter Eddie Hearn, who can ill afford another night mired by accusations of favouritism and skewed judging.
Five years ago, the outcome was clouded in controversy in Sin City, when inexplicably the judges’ cards supported a draw against Golovkin, who had clearly won the contest. Indeed, when the scores were revealed in the biggest fight in boxing at the time, they beggared belief: 115-113 for Golovkin from Dave Moretti, 114-114 from Don Trella and then 118-110 for Canelo from the judge Adalaide Byrd, which made little sense to anyone. It meant Byrd scored 10 rounds to Canelo and two to Golovkin.
The two closer cards were forgivable, though Trela’s seventh round 10-9 to Canelo, his least active round, was hard to believe. Had Trella got that one round right, Golovkin would have won by split decision.
In the post-fight haze of criticism and global condemnation, Bob Bennett, the executive director of the Nevada Athletic Commission, defended his officials but suspended judge Byrd. “I’m not going to put her right back in,” Bennett said. “She’ll still be in the business, but she needs to catch her breath.”
The fight was neither overturned, nor fully investigated. Yet the mud still sticks. Golovkin told Telegraph Sport that “nothing will take away from me that I won that night; the boxing world and the fans know”.
For this encounter, the three judges are Moretti, who scored the first Canelo-Golovkin fight for the Kazakh, Tim Cheatham and Steve Weisfeld, all very experienced officials. Promoter Hearn has plans to bring Canelo to the UK in December, while a trilogy fight with Golovkin (Canelo narrowly won the second fight with the Kazakh a year later) is planned at super middleweight, the division in which the Mexican holds all the belts, back in Vegas in September. But Canelo must first defeat Bivol.
Indeed, Bivol’s team has issued a warning about potential judging issues with the Russian fighter’s promoter, Vadim Kornilov, commented this week that the judges “whatever they do, they are going have to live with that the rest of their lives”. Kornilov, nonetheless, added that “the panel is actually a top-level panel and all the judges are very, pretty much respectable”.
Bivol himself has also been the subject of controversy ahead of this contest. A Russian citizen – born in Soviet Kyrgyzstan to a Moldovan father and an ethnic Korean mother – he has come under fire from the Klitschko brothers in Ukraine, who have stated that they believe that the defending champion should face the same sanctions as Russian athletes have done in football, tennis and other sports.
Bivol responded to Wladimir Klitschko’’s view with this comment: “He is a sportsman, he should know sports and politics is different. He was an athlete. Now he is politician. It is sad that wants to shake it up and mix sport and politics.”
In rules outlined by the World Boxing Association, whose world title belt Bivol defends, both Russian and Belarusian boxers are not currently permitted to enter the ring with their national flag, and nor will the national anthem be allowed to be played. The boxer’s country will not be named, either, as the preamble takes place from the MC in the ring.
“This is a very, very tough fight because Dmitry Bivol is fresh,” Hearn said this week. “He’s never been in trouble in a fight, he’s never been hurt in a fight, and he beat Joe Smith, the other world champion, easy.”
Indeed, and so to the fight itself, which promises so much. Bivol has all the armoury and ring generalship to push Canelo, who has come up from 154lbs to 175lbs as a world champion in the last nine years on a route to greatness in the sport, into a classic encounter of kinetic chess.
Bivol has a long and decorated amateur career behind him – 268 wins, 15 losses – and an undefeated 19-fight professional career including six years as champion against top level opposition in which the 31-year-old has shown an ease in boxing into the championship rounds, displaying all round skills which has seen him defend the title eight times. Bivol is measured, proficient and possesses great timing.
Yet the defending champion, at 6ft tall with a four and half inch height advantage and two inch reach advantage, meets a seemingly indestructible Canelo who has momentum in a purple patch of his career, as adept defensively now as the 31-year-old as with his famed power punching to the body and head of his victims. I see Canelo winning narrowly on points or by stoppage in the late rounds.
Canelo will not rest satisfied with victory here, though. He believes in a greater legacy. This week, the Mexican threw out the gauntlet to Oleksandr Usyk, the current world heavyweight champion, awaiting a rematch announcement with Britain’s Anthony Joshua, that he would fight the Ukrainian at cruiserweight, or 201lbs, a fifth weight division, in a David vs Goliath battle pitching himself against the 6ft 3ins tall, 16st Ukrainian. It would seem to be the land of fantasy fights. But never say never in boxing, and Canelo is already beginning to re-write the history books.
- Canelo vs Bivol is live on DAZN.com on Saturday May 7