Organization of Gilberto Mendoza – World Boxing Association (WBA) – was marked by a couple of new frankly vile decisions in title fights.
I was still very lucky with the first one – at least the battle will turn out to be intriguing and even unification. So, the WBA still gave the green light to a unification fight in the featherweight limit (up to 57.2 kg) between the Mexican world champions – (WBC belt holder) Ray Vargas (36-0, 22 KOs) and Leo Santa Cruz (38-2 -1, 19 KOs).
Rumor has it that the fight will take place in November.
What’s wrong with this fight? First, Santa Cruz hasn’t defended his “super champion” belt since 2019. Secondly, he had to make a mandatory defense with Briton Lee Wood (WBA World champion). Thirdly, the parties even avoided promotional bidding, as they allegedly agreed on a duel. Fourth, the WBA is allegedly working hard to ensure that they have one champion left in each weight.
A little earlier, it was announced about the supermachache Wood – Lara.
The second decision of the WBA is to re-sanction the fight in the cruiserweight limit (up to 90.7 kg) between the “super champion”, who plays for France, a native of Armenia Arsen Gulamiryan (26-0, 18 KOs) and the mandatory challenger Russian Alexei Yegorov (11-0, 7 KOs). ).
It’s even more fun here. Firstly, both have not entered the ring for a very long time: the champion has been holding the belt without a fight since 2019, the challenger has maintained his position without a fight since 2020, and won it in a fight with Ukrainian gatekeeper Roman Golovashchenko.
The second point is the sanctions against Russian athletes, which were introduced in the WBA after the full-scale military invasion of the Russian Federation into the territory of independent Ukraine in February this year.
It is possible that Yegorov will be forced to follow the example of his star compatriots Dmitry Bivol and Artur Beterbiev – they fought for titles under the flags of Kyrgyzstan and Canada, respectively. I wonder which flag the applicant will choose?
Earlier, Vitali Klitschko reacted to the broken promises of the world’s leading boxing organizations not to allow Russians to take part in title fights: “Vladimir will dip the title in a bucket of blood.” It is possible that the brothers will soon move from threats to action.
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