USYK AND CO INVADE
Once the sore thumb of boxing divisions, the 200lb weight class can now rightfully claim to be among its most talented. Here, examines the impressive crew, which is led by the even more impressive Oleksandr Usyk
Why the cruiserweight division is one to watch, and stronger than ever
IT’S hard to remember much of anything good taking place in 2016, but HBO finished a thoroughly trashy annus horribilis by accomplishing two good things on December 17 last year: first, welcoming a new era by putting Bernard Hopkins out to pasture via Joe Smith Jnr; and second, showing off for the first time a gaudily brilliant anachronism of a cruiserweight, Oleksandyr Usyk, from Kiev, Ukraine, to American crowds. Usyk, who is as fleet of foot as a dandy, and yet hits as hard as a line of Ezra Pound, is the latest Ukrainian to make his way off the K2 production line, the WBO cruiserweight champ, and no more than 11-0 (10). Supposedly, too, he’s a poet.
(Which in turn made December 17 a triply good night, given that Hopkins, long having held himself the articulatest man in boxing, was knocked off his pedestal there as well: Usyk recited a bit of his own doggerel verse, entitled ‘Karapulechka’, to Bulba News shortly after turning professional in 2013).
On his HBO debut, Usyk didn’t necessarily look up to much – against the squatly steady Thabiso Mchunu, he was oddly jammed up, stuttering and arrhythmic through six until he finally caught into gear – but don’t let that turn you off. Usyk, when flowing, is a fighter of remarkable fluency, who floats freely about the ring like a man a quarter or half his size, then hits like a man again double it. Because his feet are preternaturally fast, he’s able to occupy – for a cruiserweight – an absurd amount of ringscape: one of Usyk’s most devastating moves is to baffle his opponent backwards, then step round on the right hook, then step round on it again, opening up a new angle, and then another, in the time it takes his opposite to decipher the previous one. He’s the closest thing to a cruiserweight as religious experience.
Hence in turn, moreover, the anachronism: for a long time cruiserweight has been the least sacred of boxing’s divisions, perched as it is between middleweight glamour and heavyweight glitz, a mere station of the cross on the way of despair, and frequented as it’s often been by glum Europeans. Usyk, all gap-toothed brilliance and Dada combinations, looks from another world entirely.
The good thing for Usyk, and HBO in turn, is that the division itself is rippling with talent. Moreover, it’s full to overflowing with fighters whose interests extend beyond selfies and Twitter to the ➤