Usyk was definitely underrated - going into the Fury fight - in some quarters of the British media. Embarrassingly so.
He was a slight favorite before the first fight as Fury was coming off wetting the bed against Ngannou.
I had Usyk the favourite over Fury based on Fury having alot of issues vs a mediocre southpaw in Wallin. Fury also had issues vs another smaller Cruiserweight/Heavyweight in Cunningham who decked him. So that was my reasoning at the time and also because Fury's performance vs Ngannou was pretty awful. Against Joshua I wasn't quite sure because Usyk's performance against Chisora didn't quite exactly set world alight. So people at that time weren't quite sure how good Usyk would be at Heavyweight.
Usyk was the underdog going in to the first fight against both Joshua and Fury, come the second fight against both, Usyk went in as the favourite in the betting odds.
This was May 2024 two months after AJ had knocked out Ngannou which made Fury look even worse then he had after the Ngannou fight. If Fury was the official favorite thats not because he was expected to win the fight. The general mood was that Usyk was going to embarass Fury and if Usyk didn't have the power to knock him out Fury would come nowhere close to winning. The British do seem like they heavily bet on home fighters they don't necessarily think will win. During the 80s Bruno got almost 10 times better odds than Buster Douglas. Bruno got the best odds overall of any Tyson title defense except Michael Spinks who was the undefeated lineal HW champ. I wasn't around back then but its highly doubtful those odds were an honest reflection on Brunos chances.
It was hard there because Fury almost lost to the mma fighter and then people thought he'd duck Usyk and there were stories he was too fat for Usyk and so on. Nobody knew what Fury was getting up to. But I clearly remember Usyk was not expected to beat AJ. Hearn likes to rewrite that story and pretend they took on the ATG because they were so brave and take on all comers. In fact they were confident they were way too big and powerful. Hearn was even mouthing off saying Chisora beat Usyk. So that's the kind of confidence they had. And that's why AJ melted down so badly in the end. He believed in himself so much it broke his heart to lose.
