It was not by knockout like on the other 20 occasions, but by split decision Arthur Beterbiev victory to Dmitry Bivol and became the first undisputed light heavyweight champion in more than 20 years.
We had to wait a few months since the fight had initially been scheduled for June 1, but it had to be postponed for more than four months because Beterbiev suffered a torn meniscus four weeks before the fight.
With dissimilar cards, two judges scored 115-113, 116-112 for Beterbiev, while a third gave a 114-114 tie. At 39 years old and with a record of 21-0Beterbiev won the first unified title fight in the division since 2002.
The evening was also the first with the four major world titles – WBO, WBA, IBF and WBC – at stake, in the four-belt era.
Although Beterbiev had won his previous 20 fights by knockout, his Russian compatriot Bivol forced him to go all 12 rounds in Riyadh, in a fight in which each opponent had moments of dominance and which in the end could well have been tied.
Although both had a guaranteed purse of 10 million dollars, sports recognition had the same weight or greater value than money: They fought to be the first to give their last name in the era of the four belts.
In any case, Beterbiev is the second to hold the titles of the four main organizations of the same weight, since after the administrative decisions of the IBF to strip the Mexican of his crowns Saul Canelo Alvarez (super middleweight) and Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk (heavy), only Japanese Naoya Inoue (super bantamweight) retains that condition.
At 39 years and 265 days, Beterbiev is the second oldest man to hold a world title these days: he is only surpassed by the Cuban Erislandy Lara, middleweight champion of the World Boxing Association (WBA), who is 41 years and 184 days old. .
The Russian’s achievement is notable, since a chain of injuries and illnesses has conditioned his career, especially in recent years: he suffered Covid-19suffered an injury to the ribsunderwent a dental surgery which caused him a bone infection in the jaw and also had to undergo surgery twice for problems with knee.
Each of these situations forced the postponement of some commitment and this was no exception. His previous presentation was on January 13, when he knocked out in the seventh round Callum Smithin Quebec.
The defeated boxer, Bivol, debuted as a professional in November 2014 and just a year and a half later he won the WBA interim light heavyweight title by defeating the Dominican Felix Valera in Moscow.
Before that, he built an amateur career in which he won no less than 268 of his 283 fights. Three years after his first professional title, in October 2017 he was promoted to regular champion and since then he has made 12 successful defenses of the title.
The most important was against Saúl Álvarez in May 2022 in Las Vegas. No one else managed to beat the Mexican redhead in the last decade.