By Steve Kim
As WBA lightweight titlist Jorge Linares prepares for his May 12th showdown versus Vasyl Lomachenko, he will be doing so without his long-time trainer, Ismael Salas, who is in the UK working with David Haye as he readies for his rematch against Tony Bellew. Linares is now in Las Vegas after kicking off his preparation in Japan.
"Unfortunately, the timing is not on our side for this fight.(Salas) had already been training David Haye and he fights on May 5th and that's only a week prior to my fight," said Linares, through his manager Jose De La Cruz, to BoxingScene.com.
"I think that being familiar with fighting championship fights in the past, it doesn't mean I don't need him but we'll have a nice strategy in place and we feel with the team we have on hand that can can win this fight."
The likes of boxing veteran Rudy Hernandez will be part of the team helping prepare Linares for what is the most daunting challenge of his career.
Linares continued - "It's happened to me in the past when he couldn't travel to Japan in 2014 when I won without him. In the fight against (Luke) Campbell we had half the camp in the U.K. and did half of the training in Vegas and we won the fight. But a fight of this caliber you just can't travel out there and come back and forth and back and forth."
Also, the Venezuelan believes that logistically Las Vegas is the ideal setting for this training camp.
"In the UK we don't have a house, we don't have a physical trainer, we don't have my team. There's quite a few things we don't have. The weather, it's always raining (out there). This is my biggest fight and it just did not work out, timing was not on our side," he explained.
"In Las Vegas we have a home, family, trainers - we have everything. And at the end of the day I'm the one going up in the ring and if I don't have Salas it's not going to be an excuse whether we win or lose. It's me who's fighting, it's training, it's me putting 200-percent into this fight. We have everything, here, we have our own gym, we have the mountains in Las Vegas. We have everything you can think off.
"You only get one chance, this might be my biggest fight at this weight class so we're going to take advantage of it and go out there and win the fight."
Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.
