Moses Itauma blew away Dillian Whyte with a devastating first-round knockout in their all-British heavyweight clash in Riyadh. The 20-year-old extended his perfect record through 13 professional fights as he sent veteran Whyte sprawling to the canvas inside two minutes.<\/p>\n
The 37-year-old Whyte, a former WBC interim heavyweight champion, was not given any time to settle as Itauma \u2013 who had been made to wait in the ring by a delayed walk-in from his British rival \u2013 immediately went on the front foot.<\/p>\n
The Chatham southpaw tested Whyte with a flurry of early jabs before more precision shot combinations sent him back on to the ropes. Another powerful right hook sent Whyte crashing to the floor and, although he stumbled back on to his feet, the referee stepped in to wave off the contest with just over a minute left of the first round.<\/p>\n
Dillian Whyte reacts after being knocked down. Photograph: Hamad I Mohammed\/Reuters<\/p>\n
On the back of another hugely impressive display, the calls will continue to grow for Itauma, born in Slovakia, to be handed a world title shot in 2026, though he played down the chances of facing Oleksandr Usyk, the undisputed heavyweight champion.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what I\u2019ve been drilling for 12, 13 weeks,\u201d Itauma said on BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra. \u201cI have trained hard for this, I didn\u2019t want it to be over in the first round.<\/p>\n
\u201cI put on a performance for you guys, so it\u2019s now who\u2019s next? I don\u2019t want to call out Usyk because I don\u2019t believe I deserve the opportunity \u2013 but guys that do deserve the opportunity, I want to fight those lot. So maybe Agit Kabayel, maybe Joseph Parker. Maybe them type of names.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs of right now, I am going to rest and then maybe be back in the gym.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Moses Itauma blew away Dillian Whyte with a devastating first-round knockout in their all-British heavyweight clash in Riyadh.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75065,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82],"class_list":["post-75064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}