WBA, IBF, and WBO heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk has been training like crazy since he started preparing for Tyson Fury, and he knows exactly what this fight means and how tough it will be to win, but Usyk decided to take a go for it, believing that with his talent and skill, he could beat Fury and rewrite boxing history.
If Usyk wants to make a breakthrough, he must study Fury thoroughly, and the most important thing is that he needs to be familiar with and adapt to Fury's style of play, and formulate an effective plan for traveling, so finding the right sparring partner is extremely crucial, and there is even a view that as long as there is a suitable sparring partner, then it will be more than half successful.
This week, the Daily Mail revealed Usyk's preparations, revealing a breathtaking intensity of training. It is understood that the 37-year-old Usyk has accumulated more than 250 rounds of actual combat with sparring partners, each round is 3 and a half minutes long, and the break in the middle game is only 20 seconds, you must know that the professional boxing match is 3 minutes per round, with a 1-minute break in between, so Usyk has fought hard to defeat Fury.
It wasn't easy for Usyk to find the ideal sparring partner, as he first had to be close to Fury physically, and he also had to mimic his opponent's style of play, both of which were indispensable. In this regard, the Usyk team has been prepared for a long time, and they have specially launched their own "secret weapon", that is, an app called "Prepare for Battle".
Normally, when a fighter is looking for a sparring partner, the team members will collect as much information as possible, and after passing the screening, they will call and contact them one by one, but the problem is that sometimes you are optimistic that the sparring partner may not have a schedule, so the difficulty and intensity of the related work are very prominent. However, Usyk's team solved this problem well by introducing the "Ready to Fight" program, which listed the conditions for hiring a sparring partner - schedule, style, height, arm length, weight, etc., which greatly saved time and cost, and many fighters signed up through the program, and eventually became Usyk's ideal sparring partner.
Usyk's agent, Sergei Rabin, said: "Since the introduction of the 'Ready to Fight' program, it has become very easy to find a sparring partner instead of making more than 100 phone calls to contact everything. If you feel that you are eligible for the sparring partner, you can directly contact the fighter or agent, which is transparent. The vast majority of Usyk's sparring partners have been contacted in this way, and they come from all over the world, several of them from Africa. Without this program, it would have been difficult to find a sparring partner who matched Fury, and now the related problems have been solved. ”
A few days later, the fight against Fury was the biggest fight of Usyk's boxing career, but surprisingly, Usyk said in response to this question that his biggest fight so far was not against Fury, but to win gold at the Olympics.
As early as 2008, Usyk participated in the Beijing Olympics, but unfortunately due to lack of experience, he was eliminated early, but Usyk did not give up and participated in the 2012 London Olympics four years later, and finally stood on the top podium at this Olympics.
"An Olympic gold medal is more important than anything else, and it's a completely different race," Usyk said. When I first played in the Olympics, I lost in the second round. At first, I wanted to become a professional fighter early, but after a break of two or three months, an old friend asked me if my dream was a gold medal? I said yes! He told me to think again, try again, and eventually I did. ”
"An Olympic gold medal is not the same as a boxing belt, and if you lose in the professional arena, you might try to win another game in five or six months, or another win next year, but the Olympics have to wait four years and that's what makes it so special," Usyk added. ”