GELSENKIRCHEN, Germany (AP) - Vladimir Klitschko again proved his dominance of the heavyweight division, stopping Ruslan Chagaev in a hastily arranged title fight Saturday night before 61,000 fans at a German soccer stadium.
The IBF and WBO champion added the Ring Magazine belt to his haul,
knocking Chagaev down in the second round and opening a cut over the
Uzbekistan-born fighter’s left eye in the eighth.
Referee Eddie Cotton stopped the fight before the 10th round.
“You can’t underestimate Chagaev,” said Klitschko, who stands with
his brother Vitali as clearly the best in the division. “He did
everything today, but I was better.”
Chagaev, who is the WBA’s “champion in recess,” raised a deep bruise
under Klitschko’s right eye, but was done in by the Ukrainian’s height
advantage and superior power. With his strong left jab and hard
straight rights, Klitschko (53-3, 47 KOs) bloodied Chagaev and never
appeared in danger.
The sellout crowd was the biggest boxing audience in Germany since
Max Schmeling knocked out Adolf Heuser in front of 70,000 people in
Stuttgart in 1939.
“Throughout the fight, I searched for the keys to unlock a win, but
I just couldn’t find them,” said Chagaev, whose win over Carl Davis
Drummond in February was stopped by a similar cut above his left eye.
The matchup at the Schalke soccer club’s Veltins Arena was
originally billed as a showdown between Klitschko and former
cruiserweight champ David Haye.
Those two had gone on a worldwide press tour in which the outspoken
Haye flaunted T-shirts showing him standing in the ring with the
decapitated heads of the Klitschko brothers.
But the British fighter, whose only victory since moving to
heavyweight was a knockout of Monte Barrett in November, pulled out
earlier this month citing a back injury.
He asked to reschedule the fight for July, but Klitschko wanted to keep the date and sellout crowd.
He found a replacement in Chagaev (25-1-1), who was supposed to
fight Nikolai Valuev for the WBA title last month in Helsinki. That
bout was called off after the weigh-in when doctors found Hepatitis-B
antigens in Chagaev’s blood.
Because the rules are different in Germany, Chagaev managed to pass
a medical exam and was allowed to fight Klitschko, even though several
organizations protested, including the American Association of
Professional Ringside Physicians.
