Vitali Klitschko's Most Impressive Performance?

[Perfect Plex]

What is it & why?

[etlux]

What is it & why?

his annihilation of lennox lewis

[Bushbaby]

The loss to Lewis,that was a great performance in defeat!!(I'm very serious).

[krazyn8tive]

Corey sanders. That was a good old fashioned ass whoopin. Reminded me of many scenarios in life when "big brother" came in and took care of business cuz little brother got beat up. Vitali had his prime power and handspeed then also

[Jack Napier]

coming off injury induced layoff to slap Peter around with ease

[The Hammer]

- His comeback fight at age 37 after nearly four years of layoff due to injuries, and winning every minute of every round against the WBC champion, Sam Peter.

- His 2 round destruction of Kirk Johnson, who had never been down in a fight before and had just one loss (a DQ to Ruiz).

- His stopping the very elusive and iron-chinned Larry Donald (with several knockdowns in the 10th round). Donald had never been down in previous fights with top heavyweights like Rid**** Bowe.

- His two round destruction of prime Herbie Hide in 1999, to win his first world title

- His skillfully outboxing a young, hard-punching, undefeated Chris Arreola at the age of 38

[Safety]

ARREOLA, LEWIS, AND uhhhh PETER!

[PEBBLES!]

His performance vs Arreola was very impressive.

It was a complete shut out and utter humiliation and domination.

[edgarg]

- His comeback fight at age 37 after nearly four years of layoff due to injuries, and winning every minute of every round against the WBC champion, Sam Peter.

- His 2 round destruction of Kirk Johnson, who had never been down in a fight before and had just one loss (a DQ to Ruiz).

- His stopping the very elusive and iron-chinned Larry Donald (with several knockdowns in the 10th round). Donald had never been down in previous fights with top heavyweights like Rid**** Bowe.

- His two round destruction of prime Herbie Hide in 1999, to win his first world title

- His skillfully outboxing a young, hard-punching, undefeated Chris Arreola at the age of 38

You picked every single one of the fights I had all ready to post. I would have added only Juan Carlos Gomez, a dominant Cruiserweight Champ who defended 10 times I think, with all KO's, a highly skilled all round fighter, who, on his day, I would back to beat almost anyone, probably the best he's actually faced. VK shut him up solidly until there was nothing that he could think of to try that would give even a glimmer of hope.

Another, and the last, almost the first actually, early in his career he waylaid Timo Hoffmann, an equally huge, excellent fighter unbeaten, who either was or was on the verge of winning the European title. Until a fight or two ago, Hoffmann was the only opponent who lasted the full fight with VK, even though losing almost if not every round, so, although this fight is largely forgotten, to an enthusiast like myself, it still means something.

[nomadman]

- His comeback fight at age 37 after nearly four years of layoff due to injuries, and winning every minute of every round against the WBC champion, Sam Peter.

I'd agree that this is his most impressive performance, largely because the outcome was far from certain prior to the fight. Peter was a young, dangerous, active fighter on a six fight winning streak (including two back to back victories over James Toney), whilst Vitali was 37 years old, with four years worth of ring rust and possibly debilitating injuries to deal with. It ended up being a complete shut out, and the first time Peter had ever been stopped in his career. Knock Peter all you want, but that's a hell of an impressive feat for anyone to do.

I also agree with edgard that his stoppage of JC Gomez was another excellent performance. I rated Gomez highly before the bout, and I predicted that he'd cause a lot of trouble for Vitali, possibly even outpoint him. True, he did cause a few problems for Vitali in the early going (things which Vitali was afterwards criticised for, for goodness sake) but again he ended up getting dominated and stopped. Incidentally, this was the first fight where I really started to rate Vitali's skills over his more evident attributes of size and strength. The shot which stunned Gomez and led to the stoppage was one of the oddest punches I've seen, a sort of double right hand that only Vitali seems able to throw and get any power into the second shot which should, by all logic, have the power of a jab, given the position of the body when it's thrown. After that I went back and looked over some older fights of Vitali's and saw him pull that move off several times before, along with a slew of other weird unorthodox punches that I'd always considered bad technique but which I now saw were intentional.

Finally, just to mess things up a bit, I thought that the Vitali fight was actually one of Lewis's best performances. Vitali really took Lennox into the trenches and had him shook up bad, before Lennox rallied back and TKOed him in the sixth. Both guys brought out the best in each other that night, that's for sure.