You. Yours. Seriously. Vasyl Lomachenko will never move up or down as far as greatness and skill is concerned in the eyes of boxing fans.
I stand corrected. In addition to having you to blame, he also has himself to blame.
To be more clear, he has already been relegated to either a star that will eventually burn out over time, or the current and future most talented fighter in the entire sport of boxing.
To be fair, both pools of thought have some truth fish in them (bad pun intended). On one hand Vasyl Lomachenko has only nine career fights and a loss to a fighter with 12 fights (at the time).
This is far from criteria for the “best fighter in boxing.” Moreover, all things considered equal, this is much too soon by any standard to get a real assessment of a fighter’s true potential.
However, all things are not equal, especially in regards to Lomachenko’s record. I am sure you are well aware of his pedigree and “amateur” achievements so I will spare you that long list.
To summarize, he won a lot of fights, lost a couple, and received two gold medals in the process. Using the same measuring stick of only nine fights, let’s analyze his record through a different perspective.
It is true Vasyl Lomachenko has only nine career fights, but in his last 3 fights, check this out, his opponents had a combined record of 75 wins with only 3 losses.
This means that after his 6th fight he was fighting fighters with a maximum of only 2 losses. Just 2.
For more perspective, Floyd Mayweather’s sixth opponent had eight losses before he faced him, Roy Jones’ sixth opponent had eight losses, and Manny Pacquiao’s opponent had 19 losses.
The fighters I have mentioned are unquestionably Hall of Fame caliber fighters, and while I’m not comparing Lomachenko to them, credit must be given for the unusually difficult level of opponents he has faced so early.
Not only faced but annihilated. This is no hyperbole; Lomachenko has stopped his last three opponents, 2 by his own corner stoppage.
So the question for Lomachenko is what’s next? Lomachenko is already moving up weight classes in order to fight formidable, and really any available challenges for him, most recently moving from featherweight to junior lightweight.
He is truly in a strange position. With every dominant win, one crowd believes more and more that he is truly the best fighter in boxing while the other crowd believes it is entirely too premature to give him such recognition and only a matter of time before he is knocked off.
Whatever your personal view of Lomachenko may be, one thing is assured he is unapologetically who you think he is and barring any catastrophic happenings in boxing, nothing will change that for you.
He will never improve as fighter. Only become more of what you think he already is. And that, is all your fault.
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