Fury: I’d beat pumped-up weightlifter AJ with one arm tied behind me
Tyson Fury has told Anthony Joshua he would beat him with “one arm tied behind my back” and insisted that he is still the main man in heavyweight boxing.
Joshua called out ex-champion Fury after his 11thround stoppage of Wladimir Klitschko on Saturday night.
“[Tyson] Fury where you at, baby?” Joshua said while still in the ring. Fury has responded to that call by pledging that he would reclaim two of his old titles by inflicting the first professional defeat on WBA and IBF heavyweight champion Joshua.
“Styles do make fights but I am sure I can beat AJ with one arm tied behind my back,” Fury said in a Sky Sports interview. “I don’t even need a warm-up if he wants this. I have been out of the ring as long as Klitschko but the difference is, I am not 41, I am 28.”
Fury has not fought since winning a unanimous decision over Klitschko in November 2015.
The self-styled “Gypsy King” surrendered the various titles he won in that fight to focus on his mental health problems. Fury subsequently had his licence temporarily revoked by the British Boxing Board of Control and must wait to see if his licence is returned at a hearing next week. But Fury said from his training base in Marbella that he was delighted Joshua beat Klitschko. “It was an excellent fight, very entertaining and enjoyable and I was screaming for AJ to smash him,” Fury said.
“Iwonderwhatpeoplewould be saying today if Klitschko had done him in the sixth.
“I was screaming, pulling my hair out – or what little hair I’ve got left – because I was worried it would cost us millions!”
Fury, who described Joshua as “just a pumped-up weightlifter”, added: “There’s only one fight out there, the biggest fight in the world and everyone knows that. It is me and AJ, no one else. It is the only one the world wants to see.” Athletics’ world governing body, the IAAF, has been urged to accept a “radical” new proposal that would lead to the sport’s world records being rewritten.
European Athletics announced yesterday that its ruling council had accepted a project team’s recommendations to overhaul the record lists by eliminating any doping doubts surrounding performances.
European Athletics said it would now forward them to the IAAF “with the recommendation that the two organisations coordinate the implementation of new record ratification rules”.
The new proposal “calls for higher technical standards, increased doping control measures and new personal integrity requirements for record holders”, the European governing body said. The idea is to make record-breaking performances as credible as possible, at a time of ultrascepticism.
European Athletics president Svein Arne Hansen said: “Performance records that show the limits of human capabilities are one of the great strengths of our sport, but they are meaningless if people don’t really believe them.”
Under the new standards, a world record would only be recognised if it met three key criteria: it was achieved at a competition on a list of approved international events where the highest standards of officiating and technical equipment can be guaranteed; the athlete had been subject to an agreed number of doping control tests in the months leading up to it; and the doping control sample taken after the record was stored and available for re-testing for 10 years.
The project team also recommended that a performance be wiped from the record books if the athlete involved “commits a doping or integrity violation, even if it does not directly impact the record performance”.
Current records not meeting the criteria would remain on the all-time list but no longer be officially recognised as records.