Joe Louis vs Alexander Povetkin

Chess progress is somewhat more complicated; depends on which analysis you look at. That said, given that it's not an analogy your point rests on (and not that close to boxing), we can focus more on measurable sports.

The question of progress in measurable sports is interesting, and comes up from time to time on this forum. A few arguments on either side are:

Pro:

- Human physiology is constant across sports. If we know how to give people better stamina, strength, etc. in one sport, that knowledge doesn't simply evaporate in others, because the human body is the same. In fact, we *do* see the same methods producing gains in different sports. Since nobody in boxing disputes that cardio, strength, etc. training are useful in boxing, then the fact we can train all of these things better is relevant.

- Boxing is a culturally nostalgic sport with subjective scoring criteria and the temptation among boxing fans to idolize the fighters of their youth. This shows up most egregiously when people do things like, e.g., tie themselves in knots to pretend that Johnson looks modern on film when the literal film in front of their eyes says otherwise. So we might want to be suspicious of people who claim that some past fighter passes the eye test better than a newer guy. (But we can't take this too far: If you're a member of the younger generation, you might have an equal temptation to idolize your own era's guys.)

- We have a comparatively large talent pool today and lots of funding globally.

- We ban PEDs because we assume they work. If they don't work, they shouldn't be banned.

- Fighters stay on top for longer, which is a testament to modern training methods.

- We can indisputably fix injuries better.

Con:

- Because boxing is complicated, it's not as easy for the scientific boffins to figure out how to improve boxing skill. It's still more art than science. Consequently, a lot of the progress that we see in training for linear sports is harder to apply to boxing. There's no 1:1 relationship between "apply training mixture X" and "see boxing improvement."

- Boxing is a skill sport more than many others, where psychology, experience, determination, stylistic quirks, etc. can sometimes carry obese, old fighters to victory.

- We also see impoverished, 3rd world fighters doing well even today. The past, by definition, had a lot of these.

- All the arguments about the relative decline in boxing's talent pool

- Arguments about how some improvements in some linear sports are partly due to superior equipment, like improved tracks. Frequent citation of Jesse Owens stride length footage. And until recently (when I regretfully posted the debunking despite having initially supported the theory), Goerner.

- Boxing has been a professional sport a lot longer than most other sports, and therefore had a lot more time to perfect its approach. It also had more time to accumulate anomalously good fighters (Armstrong, Robinson, etc.) who won the genetic and environmental lottery. The talent pool of any individual past era may be smaller than the current one -- although some are larger -- but the talent pool of the *entirety of boxing history* is vast.

Neither pro nor con:

- Boxing's rules have changed enough that one might argue that extreme comparisons (Fury vs Johnson) are comparing guys in two different sports. No direct comparison can be made.

 

I'm not so sure about the second part.

You need to unify the belts these days to get a reign. Without Wlad, does Povetkin pull it off? It took some very talented people to pull the feat off historically. Tyson, Lewis, and Wlad unified. Vitali couldn't collect them all. Bowe, Fury, Holmes, and Holyfield couldn't keep them together once they'd been collected. It's rare to see someone who can stay consistent enough to knock off (up to) 4 different belt holders in sequence. Plus mandatories.

 

A lot less, with our fight schedules and promotional environment.

EDIT: Also, one wonders if his post career substance abuse issues spiral down faster with the more permissive drug culture of 2022. In 2022, there's also the general lack of -- admittedly unfair and racist -- 1930s scrutiny of his lifestyle to worry about. So I don't know what that does to him.