{"id":775559,"date":"2026-07-03T02:33:24","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T02:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/775559\/"},"modified":"2026-07-03T02:33:24","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T02:33:24","slug":"boxing-injured-yoka-ruled-out-of-wba-heavyweight-fight-with-gassiev","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/775559\/","title":{"rendered":"Boxing-Injured Yoka ruled out of WBA heavyweight fight with Gassiev"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"text-primary font-tertiary-body-baseline-regular\" data-testid=\"article-paragraph-annotation-test-id\">PARIS, July 2 &#8211; French heavyweight Tony Yoka has been ruled out of a WBA title bout with Russia&#8217;s Murat Gassiev due to a back injury, L&#8217;Equipe and other media reported on Thursday.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-primary font-tertiary-body-baseline-regular\" data-testid=\"article-paragraph-annotation-test-id\">Gassiev, previously the secondary &#8216;regular&#8217; world champion, is in line to inherit the belt relinquished by Ukrainian &#8216;super champion&#8217; Oleksandr Usyk last month.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-primary font-tertiary-body-baseline-regular\" data-testid=\"article-paragraph-annotation-test-id\">The bout with Yoka, arranged before Usyk&#8217;s announcement, was scheduled for July 11 in Moscow but L&#8217;Equipe confirmed a report by boxing journalist Dan Rafel that the 2016 Olympic champion had withdrawn.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-primary font-tertiary-body-baseline-regular\" data-testid=\"article-paragraph-annotation-test-id\">Yoka, ranked 14th by the WBA, had been due to fight British heavyweight Lawrence Okolie last April but his opponent failed a dope test and that clash did not happen.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-primary font-tertiary-body-baseline-regular\" data-testid=\"article-paragraph-annotation-test-id\">The heavyweight division has been fragmented by Usyk&#8217;s announcement, with German boxer Agit Kabayel recently declared the WBC champion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-primary font-tertiary-body-baseline-regular\" data-testid=\"article-paragraph-annotation-test-id\">Britain&#8217;s Daniel Dubois holds the WBO belt while the IBF title remains vacant. REUTERS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PARIS, July 2 &#8211; French heavyweight Tony Yoka has been ruled out of a WBA title bout with&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":775560,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[64,63,802,85],"class_list":["post-775559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-boxing","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775559","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=775559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/775560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}