Kickboxing legend Rico Verhoeven is confident that his punching power will translate to elite level professional boxing when he faces Oleksandr Usyk on May 23 in Egypt.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I land my best punch on him, of course, he will go down. It\u2019s, like, a 20 kilo weight difference,\u201d Verhoeven says. \u201cHe\u2019s like a built-up cruiserweight, and I\u2019m like a naturally-born heavyweight. That\u2019s a big difference.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 37-year-old Verhoeven is listed at 6\u20195\u201d and usually will fight around 270 lbs, which is definitely bigger than the 39-year-old Usyk, who is listed at 6\u20193\u201d and has been right around 225 lbs in his last three fights, which were two wins over Tyson Fury and one over Daniel Dubois.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s true that Usyk is a former cruiserweight, but \u201che\u2019s really a cruiserweight!\u201d has been the rally cry of opponents since he moved up to the heavyweight division in 2019. It has not stopped him; he\u2019s twice become undisputed champion of the world, even as Fury \u2014 before losing to Usyk twice \u2014 downplayed him even further as a \u201cmiddleweight\u201d before they fought.<\/p>\n
Verhoeven is absolutely big and strong enough to knock Usyk out if he lands the right shot. Landing it clean on a genuine master boxer will be the big problem. And Verhoeven knows that, unless he\u2019s far more cluelessly arrogant than I suspect. But his mindset may be that it only takes one, and everyone makes mistakes.<\/p>\n
At any rate, it\u2019s the only shot he has in the fight. He can\u2019t out-box Usyk. He has to knock him out to win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kickboxing legend Rico Verhoeven is confident that his punching power will translate to elite level professional boxing when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606971,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[64,63,802,1920,85],"class_list":["post-606970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-boxing","tag-boxing-news","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606970","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=606970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}