{"id":339328,"date":"2025-12-10T11:51:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T11:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/339328\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T11:51:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T11:51:07","slug":"oleksandr-usyk-accused-of-ducking-fight-he-previously-agreed-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/339328\/","title":{"rendered":"Oleksandr Usyk accused of ‘ducking’ fight he previously agreed to"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heavyweight king Oleksandr Usyk<\/a> has been painted with a rather unfavourable brush, accused of swerving his leading challenger after vacating his WBO world title.<\/p>\n

The Ukrainian elected to relinquish his strap earlier this month, not long after being ordered to face mandatory contender Fabio Wardley.<\/p>\n

Prior to that, Wardley had claimed his WBO interim title with an 11th round stoppage victory over former world champion Joseph Parker<\/a>, who, it was later revealed, had tested positive for cocaine on the day of their enthralling encounter last month.<\/p>\n

As a result of Usyk vacating his belt, Wardley has since been upgraded from interim to full WBO world champion<\/a>, with a maiden defence of his title expected to arrive next spring.<\/p>\n

That first defence, however, is unlikely to be a unification against Usyk, who still holds the WBC, IBF and WBA world titles following his fifth round stoppage victory over Daniel Dubois last July.<\/p>\n

With that win, the vastly accomplished technician achieved his ambition of becoming a three-time undisputed champion.<\/p>\n

The 38-year-old has left himself with very little to prove, as with two victories over Dubois, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua, respectively, the Olympic gold medallist has firmly rubber-stamped his supremacy in this heavyweight era.<\/p>\n

But despite that, the manager of Wardley, Michael Ofo, nonetheless believes that Usyk is actively avoiding his big-punching client.<\/p>\n

In an interview with talkSport<\/a>, Ofo explained that, before Usyk vacated his title, an agreement was put in place for the formidable southpaw to face Wardley.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore the [Parker] fight, Usyk\u2019s team put an offer out there. I won\u2019t go into too much detail, but we agreed to everything in principle.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of the terms they wanted, we agreed to them, and then they backed out. To be honest, I thought that Usyk was going to take the fight.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought he was the type of champion who doesn\u2019t duck challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since vacating the belt, Usyk has confirmed that the Wardley fight does not interest him at this moment in time and has instead called out Deontay Wilder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Heavyweight king Oleksandr Usyk has been painted with a rather unfavourable brush, accused of swerving his leading challenger…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[64,63,802,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-339328","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-boxing","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}