On the night of 29 April 2017, at Wembley Stadium, Anthony Joshua knocked down and defeated the Ukraine’s former world heavyweight champion, Vladimir Klitschko. In doing so, he added the WBA and IBO heavyweight titles to the IBF belt he already held.
That bald statement of fact does little justice to what proved to be one of the finest heavyweight contests of all time, in which a brilliant but relatively inexperienced fighter took on, and eventually defeated, one of the finest boxers of his or any other age. It was a twelve-round fight before a record post-War crowd, and for eleven of those rounds it could have gone either way; indeed, in Round 6 it looked as though Joshua was finished when a massive right hand from Klitschko sent him to the canvas.
But the fight also harked back to an earlier era of true sportsmen, far outshining the hype and flummery of lesser fighters, with Joshua as graceful and generous in victory as Klitschko was in defeat. For once, boxing lived up to its description as ’the Noble Art’, and is all the richer for it.
In this, the first post-Klitschko fight study of this remarkable boxer, bestselling sports writer Frank Worrall looks at the life and career of a young man who has won all nineteen of his professional fights by KO. Since that glorious day in 2012, when Joshua won gold at the London Olympics, he has shown himself to be a true gentleman – but a fighter to the core. At twenty-seven, he has a glittering career ahead of him, and it seems certain that he is poised to revive heavyweight boxing and usher in a new Golden Age.
Om författaren
Frank Worrall is a journalist who writes regularly for the Sunday Times and The Sun. He is also the author of number one bestseller Roy Keane: Red Man Walking, and countless football books including Rooney: Wayne’s World, Giggsy and The Magnificent Sevens.
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