Did Vitali Klitschko improve in his 2008 comeback?

Well there were exactly FOUR Yes votes on the poll, and I'm guessing that 2 or 3 of those belong to him or some rendition of....

 

Yeah right? Lewis chooses to retire instead of rematching a man who's face he cuts to shreads, but Holmes continues to hang on to a title rather than rematching a 15 fight Witherspoon who might have edged him on fair scorecards. Yet somehow the former is the guilty one of "ducking".

 

I think his opposition remained the same personally.. Hide, Sanders, K.Johnson, Williams, Purity, etc are all on close par with Peter, Arreloa, Johnson, Adamek, etc. The main difference for me is that the post retirement version of Vitali was taken the distance or to the later rounds on more occasions in his comeback and seemed to be less busy at times as well.. I see no improvements either way in comp or ability.

 

I think we saw his prime.. And that was the version from about the Herbie Hide fight of 99 to the Danny Williams bout of '04.. He was 27 to 33 years of age during that stretch and had between 24 to 37 bouts, including meetings with some of his best opponents and not to mention, a physical advantage over about 99.999% of the division. I don't see how he would have improved much beyond the age of 33, even if he had stayed active rather than disappear for four years.

 

Maybe. We don't know how he would have reacted if suffering the same sort of injury again.. Incidentally, I'm one of the few people who don't judge him as harshly for the Chris Byrd loss as some others do. In fairness, he had been fighting with that torn rotator cuff for several rounds, yet still keeping ahead of Byrd on the scorecards. Its fair to award Byrd the win but I never felt he truly "beat" Vitali Klitschko.