If Gvozdyk the first in Beterbiev's resume, which is Radivoje Kalajdžić?

He's not in the top six.

Gvozdyk, Smith Jr., Cloud, Browne and Campillo were all titlists. (Campillo could've been twice.) Callum Johnson is pretty good, too.

 

Kovalev clearly was not a massive LHW. What is this BS now, just because he's gone up to cruiser and is way too small there.

Not only was he too small the last fight, he's talking about taking more weight off because he felt slow. So he'll be even smaller still. Most cruisers are cutting from well over 200. Kovalev is basically not cutting at cruiser. He's not a cruiser. Let's get that out the way.

There's a big gap between LHW and cruiser, yes. But he's not even on the cruiser side of that gap by normal standards. If he was walking about at 190, that's only a 15lb drop all through camp and the cut, that's less than many would cut on fight week alone. The weight gain for Canelo fight would likely just fat, the guy has discipline issues as everyone knows.

He's only 6ft tall and looks lanky. The idea he is a weight bully at LHW is plainly ridiculous. If anything, he was a lighter cutter than average when you see how bulky so many LHWs are at 6ft+. If he looked like a bodybuilder at 6ft or was much taller, maybe the weight bully thing could be on the table, but he's clearly not tall or bulky for a LHW, so it's impossible he has all this extra size others don't.

Kovalev got sick of doing the weight cut at middle-age when he was probably getting too fat and lazy between camps. This doesn't mean he was ever draining heavily. Malignaggi when up to 147 for the same reason, plenty of others also.

 

You don’t realise that he looks lanky because he is huge? His frame and his bone structure is of a cruiserweight. Pavlik looked lanky at middleweight because he was a huge middleweight. Roy Jones was small for light heavyweight because he looked like a tank. That’s how it works.

He walks around at 200:

“He arrived in Russia one month before the fight and “was right on weight at 182”. The fight was soon cancelled the first week of June and rescheduled for August 24 “so I went back home to US and during those three weeks we celebrated my wife’s birthday and all the sudden I got back to 200 pounds”, which is his regular walk-around weight. Training camp for the new date began June 20 and on July 20 he returned to Russia.”

Kovalev himself:

“Now I feel fresh. Making 175 was killing me. I was at the point either quit or move up in weight.”

Hopkins on the Kovalev fight:

“It’s not even hard to really to try to explain.I couldn’t overpower him. I felt like a middleweight or maybe a super middleweight in there with a cruiserweight. I don’t know what it looked like to you all. I couldn’t get into the range that I wanted to get into and the range was the length.“

People talk about Beterbiev being a huge light heavyweight, even though his walk around weight is 185lbs - and that’s how much he weighed when he was fighting guys like Usyk in the amateur heavyweight division.

Most cruisers are not cutting from well over 200, that’s complete nonsense. They fight at cruiser when they are too small for heavyweight. Heavyweight is prestigious.


So quit with the BS that Kovalev wasn’t a massive light heavyweight. He said it - he killed himself to make weight. You said it when you called him lanky - he’s got little muscle and fat and he was still killing himself to make it.

This isn’t difficult or controversial, it’s a fact that Kovalev was a huge light heavyweight.

 

Hahahaha ffs.

He literally says he killed himself to make light heavy. He has very little soft tissue. His opponents say it was like fighting a cruiserweight. Kovalev literally fought at cruiserweight a month ago weighing in at 196, and looked the same as when he was at light heavy. He’s a massive light heavyweight and you still want to claim otherwise? Wtf are people motivated by here? How are you looking at earth from space and claiming it’s flat?

Take 20 pounds off this (look up a picture of Kovalev from his cruiser weigh in, couldn’t post it here)? Kovalev should’ve been fighting at cruiserweight years ago. Is this a guy who has simply let himself go between fights? The crap about Kovalev having a poor work ethic is because he was stupidly killing himself to make weight for a division he really had no business being at. People wondered why he looked fatigued in fights. It’s because you had a big-boned cruiserweight draining to light heavyweight.