Wladimir Klitschko often receives a lot of flak (and appreciation) for his dominance during the 'weak, dull' 2006-2014 era. During this period, Wlad unified all but one of the alphabet titles and fought all the leading contenders he could face and beat every single one of them. The era has a poor reputation among fans and critics alike and a good deal of the blame is unfairly heaped on Wlad, the steel hammer. However, let us look at the top fighters of this era. Wladimir Old Vitali Valuev Peter Chagaev Ibragimov Haye Povetkin Pulev I have excluded older versions of Byrd, Maskaev, Rahman, Briggs, Brewster and Ruiz as they primed in the previous era. I have also excluded Liakhovich as he is totally insignificant. If you go through the list, Wladimir fought everybody else with the exception of Vitali who was his own brother and Valuev who ducked him. So where does the real problem lie? Well, consider the rest of the competition. Ibragimov and Pulev did not fight anyone. Vitali and Peter fought only each other. Haye fought only Valuev. Povetkin fought only Chagaev. Chagaev fought Valuev and Povetkin. Valuev fought Chagaev and Haye. There were only four fights out of the TWENTY_EIGHT possible fights among the seven guys on the list. That - in my opinion - was the biggest problem of their era. What do you think?
You have the correct assessment of the era. The flaw of this era is that too many contenders did not engage often enough with each other. It’s not that these guys couldn’t fight - they could - most of them had extensive and excellent amateur backgrounds. Such as Pulev, Povetkin, Chagaev, Ibrigamov. However the lack of interest stateside in Eastern European fighters left little money to be made in round robin bouts against each other. So Most of these guys waited in line to get their shot at Wlad collect their enormous payday and take it back home to live like kings from former poor countries. Even today Eastern European fighters don’t draw well, Usyk is the exception but that’s because he has the British world level fighters to be his foil. Dubois, Chisora, Joshua and Fury. If he was fighting title fights against names like Pulev, and Ibrigamov unfortunately I don’t think anyone would care. It’s about perspective. As it was though Wlad faced numerous prime challenges from seasoned fighters and turned them back. It’s an underrated championship run. It’s also so long in terms of years it’s really two eras he ruled.