Lemieux Targets Canelo Showdown - Catch-Weight is Ruled Out

by Luke Furman

This past Saturday night at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada, former IBF middleweight champion David Lemieux (36-3, 32 KOs) returned to the ring and was forced to go the ten round distance, winning a lopsided unanimous decision over Cristian Fabian Rios (21-8-3 6 KOs) of Argentina. The scores were 100-90, 100-90 and 99-91.

Lemieux was not very happy with his own performance. He wasn't at his best in the contest. There were numerous moments in the fight where Lemieux let his guard down, which allowed Rios to land clean punches.

The Canadian slugger was also aggressively pushing to get a knockout in almost every round. Rios had never been stopped in his career and never allowed Lemieux to land anything of note to the head.  

Lemieux's trainer, Marc Ramsey, was very happy to see his fighter go rounds - and so was manager Camille Estephan.

"Marc wanted to go rounds, even if that wasn't what David wanted. David was returning from knee surgery and he didn't get hurt and I'm really delighted. The result was promising," Estephan told RDS.

The plan right now is to get Lemieux a possible undercard position on the December 17th event being staged by Golden Boy Promotions at The Forum in Los Angeles. The HBO televised main event will feature Bernard Hopkins, in the final fight of his career, against Joe Smith Jr.

The goal for Lemieux and his team is to finalize a showdown with Saul 'Canelo' Alvarez (48-1-1, 34KOs) in the first half of 2017. Lemieux and Canelo are both promoted by Golden Boy.

Canelo, who currently holds the WBO junior middleweight title, is planning to move up to 160-pounds in his next fight. But, his trainers have recently mentioned a potential catch-weight of 158 to test out the full middleweight waters. Canelo had previously held the WBC middleweight title, but he never fought beyond a catch-weight of 155.

Lemieux, who trains very hard to get down to the middleweight limit, will not agree to fight at anything less than 160-pounds. 

"The ultimate goal is to fight against Canelo. I can not stop repeating it, but that's it. I think it will happen in 2017. Discussions are already underway. It is easy for us to make this fight, because we are close to Golden Boy. But Canelo knows that a weight between 154 and 160 - it will not be possible," Estephan stated.

The original plan was to land a crack at WBO middleweight champion Billy Joe Saunders in December. That won't be possible with Saunders being scheduled to make is first defense next month - and last week the WBO ordered Saunders to make back to back mandatory defenses.

"It was in the script for David to be a world champion when he faced Alvarez. That's why we wanted to face Saunders in December," Estephan said.

Luke Furman covers boxing for bokser.org.