{"id":677426,"date":"2026-07-06T22:10:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T22:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/677426\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T22:10:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T22:10:08","slug":"dmitry-bivol-ordered-to-defend-light-heavyweight-titles-against-callum-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/677426\/","title":{"rendered":"Dmitry Bivol ordered to defend light heavyweight titles against Callum Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\">Unified light heavyweight champion Dmitry Bivol has been ordered to defend his titles against his mandatory challenger Callum Smith by the WBO.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">BoxingScene reported earlier this month that Bivol, who recently returned with a win over Michael Eifert in May, after a year\u2013plus absence connected to back surgery, had alerted the WBO of his decision to face Smith next. There had been reports of Bivol facing Artur Beterbiev in a trilogy bout, after their first two razor-close encounters left them one-a-piece, but Bivol has opted to keep his WBO title and face Smith.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unified light heavyweight champion Dmitry Bivol has been ordered to defend his titles against his mandatory challenger Callum&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":677427,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,6102,10078,10271,9555,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-677426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-boxing-news","tag-boxingscene","tag-callum-smith","tag-dmitry-bivol","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677426\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/677427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}