The undisputed champion is in camp with Anthony Joshua. He still found a moment to tip his cap to the man in the opposite corner.
There is a particular look that comes over Oleksandr Usyk whenever Tyson Fury’s name is put to him. Not a scowl, not a smirk – something closer to affection, filtered through the grammar of a man who has beaten you twice and knows it.
Speaking to Boxing King Media, the Ukrainian was asked about Fury’s latest outing, a seventh-round retirement win over Polish veteran Mariusz Wach in Thailand on Friday night. Anyone hoping for a dig went home hungry.
“I know Mariusz, he was my sparring partner,” Usyk said, before joking about the size of the Pole’s midriff and thanking Fury for the trouble. In Usyk’s telling, the Gypsy King had done his old gym-mate a favour: Fury, he said, had helped Wach earn.
It is a small thing. It is also, if you have followed this division for any length of time, quite a revealing one.
The economy of the sparring partner
Wach has spent the better part of two decades being the away fighter at other men’s homecomings. He took Wladimir Klitschko the full twelve back in 2012 and has been trading on that granite ever since, criss-crossing continents to give somebody else’s comeback a name on the poster.
That is the trade. Big men who can absorb punishment and stay upright are a currency in this sport, and they are paid accordingly — which is to say, better than most people realise and nowhere near what the man opposite them is banking.
Usyk understands the arrangement because he benefited from it. Wach shared rounds with him behind closed doors, the sort of unglamorous work that never appears on a record. So when the champion says Fury helped Wach make money, he is not being sarcastic. He is acknowledging a piece of boxing’s plumbing that rarely gets a mention on fight night.
Two nights, two very different Saturdays
The scheduling was no accident. Fury took the Wach assignment on Friday; Anthony Joshua faced Kristian Prenga twenty-four hours later. Two tune-ups, one weekend, both men keeping busy ahead of a fight British boxing has been circling for the better part of a decade.
Fury’s evening was the duller of the two, and that will have suited him perfectly. He controlled it, Wach’s corner had seen enough by the seventh, and the Gypsy King added another comfortable round of work to a comeback that began in April with a one-sided points win over Arslanbek Makhmudov.
Joshua’s Saturday was rather more eventful. Two first-round knockdowns had the arena on its feet and the doubters reaching for their phones, before AJ steadied himself and stopped Prenga inside two. Effective, eventually. Comfortable, absolutely not.
The upshot is unchanged: Fury and Joshua are expected to finally share a ring in November.
The strangest wrinkle of the lot
Here is where it gets interesting. Usyk is currently training alongside Joshua — the man he stopped in Tottenham, the man he outboxed in Saudi Arabia before that, and now, apparently, a stablemate of sorts.
Which means the only fighter to have beaten Fury is in the building while Fury’s next opponent prepares. Whatever information passes between Usyk and Joshua in those gyms is worth more than any tale of the tape. Usyk has fought Fury twenty-four rounds. He knows where the Gypsy King’s weight sits when he’s tired, how he responds to being walked down, what he does when the scorecards get close.
Usyk beat Fury on a split decision in May 2024 to become undisputed heavyweight champion, then removed the ambiguity seven months later with a unanimous points win in the rematch. Fury retired. Fury un-retired. That is a familiar cycle by now.
Asked in the same interview about Fury more broadly, Usyk did not reach for the needle. He described the Englishman as the hardest night of his career — high praise from a man who has never lost as a professional — and made a point of noting Fury’s generosity towards his sparring partners.
“For me, haters it’s motivation”
The rest of the sit-down was vintage Usyk: half philosopher, half wind-up merchant, entirely himself.
He addressed the abuse aimed at both Joshua and Fury online, dismissing the people behind it as unwell and arguing that professional fighters simply cannot afford to absorb it. His own approach was blunter — the hostility, he said, fuels him.
He also cleared up the moment he shared with Joshua after their fight, when the two men prayed together in the ring. Nothing mystical, by his account. He had asked for safety for both of them, and for love and respect between them.
On why he keeps going, with the belts collected and the money long since made, he was disarmingly honest. He compared the sport to an addiction and said what drives him now is legacy rather than the purse. “Discipline is my life,” he told Boxing King Media, before adding that fighters who walk away and stop moving tend to pay for it later — his advice being to keep the cardio going long after the last bell.
Family, he said, comes first. Then God, then the business.
Where this leaves us
Fury has his rounds. Joshua has his scare, and probably needed it. Usyk, having beaten both, now sits in one camp offering counsel on the other.
November cannot come quickly enough.
Watch the full interview with Boxing King Media below:
