Serhii Bohachuk: record, next fight and profile →
Former junior middleweight titleholder Israil Madrimov has pulled out of his December 21 fight against Serhii Bohachuk in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, due to an illness, according to Turki Alalshikh.
After a grueling 12-round Fight of the Year candidate in August, most boxers these days would put the gloves and mouthpiece in their locker at the gym and be content to sit out the rest of the year and enjoy getting fat for the holidays.
Junior middleweight contender Serhii Bohachuk met with Jalisco governor Pablo Lemus Navarro on Thursday as Bohachuk prepares for his December 21 fight against Israil Madrimov in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
It’s been more than three decades since Tom Loeffler got into boxing. But Loeffler, as with everyone else working on the business side of the sweet science, cannot rest solely on his past accomplishments. He’s constantly looking toward the future.
In this week’s mailbag, we tackle your thoughts on what comes next for Tim Tszyu after the three-round drubbing he took at the hands of Bakhram Murtazaliev; we stay with the junior middleweights to talk about the year Serhii Bohachuk has had and whether he deserved better; we discuss some criticism of the International Boxing Hall of Fame; and we once again try to make sense of decisions made by the sanctioning bodies.
If you’re a matchmaker connected to one of the world's best junior middleweights, you pretty much can’t go wrong pairing them with any other fighter in the division. There are probably 50 different combinations Eric Raskin would pay to see right now. But here are his top 15...
For Serhii Bohachuk, 2024 has been a year of figuratively rolling with the punches. Bohachuk (24-2, 23 KOs) was supposed to fight Sebastian Fundora for the vacant WBC junior middleweight world title in March on the undercard of Tim Tszyu vs. Keith Thurman. But when Thurman got hurt, Fundora stepped in — and suddenly the main event was for both Tszyu’s WBO title and the WBC title. Bohachuk instead defeated Brian Mendoza for the interim WBC belt.
An attempt to be undisputed in a fistic sport such as boxing is tantamount to seeking greatness. That was what Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol had in mind when they went head-to-head last Saturday.
There’s no belt connected to this fight, and there doesn’t need to be. Serhii Bohachuk versus Israil Madrimov – the fight crowned on Tuesday as the co-main event to the Dec. 21 Oleksandr Usyk-Tyson Fury unified heavyweight title rematch in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – is pure action.
Seven months after losing to Sebastian Fundora, Tim Tszyu has described the unified WBC and WBO junior middleweight titlist as the man to beat at 154.