By Keith Idec
A day after Vasyl Lomachenko contended that Guillermo Rigondeaux opted to fight him just for the payday, Rigondeaux delivered an accusation of his own.
The WBA super bantamweight champion claimed during a conference call Wednesday that Lomachenko agreed to fight him only because they’re now two weight classes apart. According to the unbeaten Cuban southpaw, Lomachenko refused to fight him when the WBO super featherweight champion competed at 126 pounds.
“We tried and we tried and we tried, and he wouldn’t step in the ring with me,” Rigondeaux said through a translator. “Now he wants to step in the ring with me at 130 because he believes he has an advantage over me.”
Ukraine’s Lomachenko (9-1, 7 KOs), who’ll battle Rigondeaux (17-0, 11 KOs, 1 NC) on December 9 in New York, later dismissed Rigondeaux’s charge as “nonsense.”
“We all can’t believe in that nonsense, whatever he’s saying,” Lomachenko said through a translator. “We have a video of one of the reporters asking him, ‘Would you like to fight Vasyl Lomachenko?,’ when I was at 126. He asked the reporter, ‘Hold on a second. At what weight am I fighting?’ And the reporter said, ‘122.’ [And he said], ‘Well, what kind of question do we have? I’m fighting at 122. So why are you asking this silly question?’ And this video is on YouTube. Everybody can find it, so it’s not the truth.”
The 29-year-old Lomachenko, a 4-1 favorite over Rigondeaux, decided to move up from featherweight to super featherweight early in 2016. He’ll make the fourth defense of the WBO 130-pound championship he won by knocking out Rocky Martinez in the fifth round in June 2016 when he encounters Rigondeaux in The Theater at Madison Square Garden (ESPN).
The 37-year-old Rigondeaux has never weighed in at more than 123 pounds for a professional fight.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
