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Southampton boxer Edmondson suffers defeat to Lapin at Wembley
Southampton boxer Edmondson suffers defeat to Lapin at Wembley

Yahoo

time20-07-2025

  • Sport
  • Yahoo

Southampton boxer Edmondson suffers defeat to Lapin at Wembley

SOUTHAMPTON boxer Lewie Edmondson lost his undefeated record in a majority decision defeat to Daniel Lapin at Wembley Stadium on Saturday. Edmondson, 29, was edged on decision (95-95, 96-94, 96-94) in a tight contest during the undercard for Oleksandr Usyk vs Daniel Dubois' second fight. Edmondson looked baffled when the scorecards were read out in favour of his Polish-born Ukrainian opponent, having felt he did enough to secure a career-progressing win. After a slow start, Edmondson pinned Lapin into the corner at the end of the fourth round, and the 28 year old could only get out by holding onto 'The Saint'. In the eighth round, Edmondson forced Lapin back into the ropes, and the six-foot-six-inch southpaw got tangled twice. Lapin responded with a combination of blows in the ninth round - his best of the night - which may have been the deciding factor in the eyes of the judges. With this win, Lapin is now IBF Intercontinental, WBA Continental and WBO International light-heavyweight champion. Edmonson's record has dropped to 11-1 (3 KOs), but he should be proud despite suffering a tight defeat, which could have gone either way.

Daniel Lapin, Ukraine's next big boxing hope, on Usyk bonds after Russia ‘broke' early career
Daniel Lapin, Ukraine's next big boxing hope, on Usyk bonds after Russia ‘broke' early career

The Guardian

time18-07-2025

  • Sport
  • The Guardian

Daniel Lapin, Ukraine's next big boxing hope, on Usyk bonds after Russia ‘broke' early career

Daniel Lapin pulls up a video on his phone and, having chatted away for 40 minutes, lets the images do the talking. Or, more accurately, the sounds. It is a scene he captured in the early hours of a Kyiv morning during the spring and what stands out above everything is the awful, incessant, gathering buzz of the Russian-controlled drones that plague Ukraine's capital almost every night. Sleep is rendered impossible for residents during those attacks, partly due to the sheer noise and in huge degree to the fear that you, or your loved ones, will be struck next. 'After a night like that you don't want to train,' he says. 'It can go on five nights in a row. You don't want anything, you're just walking around like a zombie.' On Saturday, though, Lapin will be fully alert to the task at hand. The light-heavyweight is Ukraine's next boxing hope, his promise and pedigree immense, and his fight against Lewis Edmondson will be a highlight of the undercard before Oleksandr Usyk and Daniel Dubois contest their undisputed world heavyweight title bout at Wembley. Lapin has seen Russia's aggression stall his career on two distinct occasions but is closer than ever to carving out a legend of his own. His bond with Usyk is tight. Although born in Poland he grew up in Simferopol, the Crimean city that was also home to Usyk. The superstar has honed a keen appreciation of the younger man's talent; Lapin is a trusted member of his camp and a regular training partner. 'Everything works like a Swiss clock,' Lapin says of the disciplined, intensely motivated regime implemented on the east coast of Spain. No phones are allowed, let alone any social media; news of the horrors that continue to unfold back home barely trickles through until camp members return to the outside world. It says plenty for Lapin's mentality that he has progressed this far. In 2014 he was 16 and thriving at amateur level, hoping to compete at the Youth Olympic Games and European Championships, when Russia annexed Crimea and a potentially critical period in his young career was effectively written off. 'It had been a very developed boxing scene, hard, a lot of competitors,' he says. 'But then Russia destroyed sport in Crimea. 'It became completely cut off from the rest of the world. I was there for three years under occupation and did almost nothing: I only wanted to box for Ukraine. The occupation broke my amateur career. It felt very bad, like a kind of depression.' Many of his friends became stuck, or went down undesirable routes. Would it not have been easy for Lapin's life to slide into disrepair, or worse? 'I had a dream to become a world champion and I have a mental goal to make it,' he says. 'I understood that, if I got into anything else, I wouldn't be anyone.' He was eventually able to leave for Kyiv and begin working with Usyk, who his father had previously coached. Lapin's brother is also Usyk's team director. The conditions were in place for quick development and, eventually, a winning professional debut in August 2020. He had grown to a towering 6ft 6in, his shape returning after those years out of competition, but the uncertainties of plotting a path to the top remained. 'I lived alone, had very little money, had to organise my own life around training sessions,' he says. 'Then when you go to the camp, there's a strict training regime but you return to your empty flat and have to cook for yourself. You're looking on YouTube for recipes. I'd cook a huge portion of buckwheat to last a week, but would end up burning it.' Nonetheless Lapin's professional life continued to blossom. By the time Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he had won five of five professional fights, overcoming Poland's Pawel Martyniuk at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on the Usyk-Joshua undercard five months previously. The rematch was in his sights when everything became unmoored again. 'I'd just recovered from Covid and was waiting to start shaping up again,' he says. 'That morning I got up, there were bangs, the building near us was cracked at the top. In the next four months I lost 11 kilos and it was hard to start training again. Russia disrupted my career twice.' Once again he bounced back, gathering himself to link up with the camp again and overcome Slovakia's Josef Jurko in Jeddah that August. Lapin views anticipation, 'seeing the punches', as his biggest strength but plenty of other attributes have amassed since he followed the family example and took up boxing, hesitantly at first, during childhood. He has won all 11 of his professional fights, four by knockout. A world title shot cannot be far off. Usyk is a constant source of encouragement and advice – 'He who is afraid dies' is Lapin's favourite – but he knows that, despite the network around him, the final push comes from within. 'Working with an undisputed world champion doesn't mean you'll become one too,' he says. 'It doesn't work that way. In the end it depends only on the fighter himself.' Lapin's time has been split between Kyiv, the Usyk camp and London in the buildup to Saturday. On the phone screen he shows more harrowing videos, this time taken by friends in the past week, of drones wailing to a crescendo before exploding close to residential buildings. Wembley will host an occasion that has significance far beyond the sport he loves but he knows at first hand that symbolism will only do a fraction of the job for Ukraine. 'Every activity that highlights Ukraine in the international area is massively important, of course,' he says. 'But we are waiting for actions, not only for highlighting.' For Lapin and the rest of the Usyk camp, action is what comes naturally.

‘Usyk's willpower is stronger than any other boxer. We do things nobody else would do'
‘Usyk's willpower is stronger than any other boxer. We do things nobody else would do'

New York Times

time18-07-2025

  • Sport
  • New York Times

‘Usyk's willpower is stronger than any other boxer. We do things nobody else would do'

There is one key thing that separates heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk (23-0, 14 KOs) from his peers, according to Daniel Lapin, the 11-0 (4 KOs) light heavyweight who has known the Ukrainian since childhood and trains alongside him throughout the gruelling camps that prepare him for battle. 'Character,' says Lapin, without hesitation. Advertisement 'His willpower is the strongest of all other boxers,' he expands. 'His endurance also is amazing.' Lapin's assessment gives little hope to British heavyweight Daniel Dubois (22-2, 21 KOs) who, at London's Wembley Stadium on Saturday, will aim to do what Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua could not and end the 38-year-old's unbeaten record to become Britain's first undisputed heavyweight champion since Lennox Lewis more than a quarter of a century ago. Usyk and Dubois first met in Wroclaw, Poland, just over two years ago when the former won via a ninth-round stoppage despite being knocked to the canvas in the fifth. The punch that sent him there was ruled a 'low blow' by the referee, who gave Usyk almost four minutes to recover before allowing the fight to continue. Dubois and his team believe the punch was legitimate and that the Brit was 'cheated' out of a potential victory. Now he has his chance for revenge. The two-year gap between fights with Usyk has given Dubois a chance to build on the confidence he gained during that first bout, when he believes his power was almost enough to take the belts from the champion. Since then, he has recorded impressive victories against Jarrell Miller, Filip Hrgovic and Joshua — the latter an impressive fifth-round knockout that gave Dubois the biggest win of his career so far. Usyk, though, has also beaten Joshua — twice. And Fury — twice. And he's widely regarded as one of the finest boxers of his generation; an Olympic and world champion as an amateur, an undisputed champion at cruiserweight and the first undisputed heavyweight champion of the four-belt era. While his opponents largely have an advantage on him in terms of size, they have not been able to match Usyk for technical skill, boxing IQ or fitness. However, he is more than a decade older than the 27-year-old Dubois. Is there hope for the Brit then in the idea that Usyk's best could be behind him, that perhaps this fight might finally be the one that looks like a step too far? Asked whether he has seen any indications of that throughout their latest training camp in Spain, Lapin simply smiles. Advertisement 'Absolutely no signs,' he replies. 'This Saturday, Oleksandr Usyk will become third-time undisputed champion.' At 28, Lapin, who will box the unbeaten British and Commonwealth light-heavyweight champion Lewis Edmondson on the undercard tomorrow night, is a year older than Dubois but is at a far earlier point in his career as a professional. That's partly because of his distinguished amateur record. Introduced to boxing by his father (who was Usyk's first boxing coach) at the age of six, Lapin fought almost 300 times as an amateur. He won multiple Ukrainian championships and fought at European and World Championships. In Ukraine, the title of Master of Sports is awarded to those who excel in their field. Lapin was just 14 years old when he was given that title. A post shared by Usyk. The Cat. Oleksandr (@usykaa) Everything was building towards the 2016 Olympic Games in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, where he dreamed of emulating Usyk in winning gold for their country. But in 2014, everything changed when Russia invaded Crimea, the region of Ukraine where Lapin grew up, lived and trained (he was born in Poland, but moved there at the age of two). 'I stopped evolving in boxing for three or four years because of the occupation,' he explains via his interpreter, Daria (he understands quite a bit of English but isn't quite at the point yet where he's confident of answering questions in the language). 'Everything had gone towards winning an Olympic medal but Russia destroyed my plans. Then I was just sitting around, watching opponents that I used to beat — and they were taking all the medals in the Olympics.' Lapin fell into depression. He was lost without the sport that had been his life since he first put on a pair of gloves. It was Usyk who came to his rescue, helping him to leave Crimea in 2019 and taking him to Ukraine's capital Kyiv, where he was welcomed to train alongside the then-cruiserweight champion and begin his transition into the professional ranks. Advertisement His professional debut came in 2020 in Ukraine, where his first four fights took place. The following year, he was given the chance to box on the undercard of Usyk's first fight against Joshua, at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London, when his fight took place early in the night before the official card had begun. Since then, he has also fought on big nights in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (on the undercard of both of Usyk's victories over Fury), but Lapin remains driven by the loss of his Olympic dream. 'I used to think that it affected me negatively,' he says of his experiences. 'But now I think it's for the best. The only thing I regret is the lost time that I cannot have back.' Will anything ever be able to make up for that missed opportunity? 'Yes — when I will become the absolute champion of the world.' Training alongside Usyk has given Lapin, whose older brother Sergey is the manager of Team Usyk, a unique insight into what it takes to become undisputed world champion in two weight classes. Asked to describe what their training sessions are like, he says it would 'take too long' to explain. Instead, he simply says, 'we do what 95 per cent of boxers do not do. We do the most difficult parts of training.' As well as the physical grind of strength and power training, conditioning and sparring, that includes cognitive training. Their recently retired countryman Vasiliy Lomachenko, who was widely regarded as one of the most technically gifted boxers of his generation, was renowned for the mental training that was part of his regime, including completing mathematical puzzles against the clock and tackling word games. Lapin says he and Usyk are 'next level from this for already one and a half years. We do more difficult, more complex things'. At 6ft 6in (198cm), Lapin is a few inches taller than Usyk, but boxes two weight classes below his compatriot, and has a longer, leaner physique. That doesn't stop the two of them competing in training though, he says. Who wins? 'Sometimes me, sometimes Oleksandr.' Lapin's superiority shows itself mostly at the pull-up bar, he says, where he can complete 10 pull-ups with 50kg (110lb) of additional weight hanging from his waist; something he says Usyk is yet to try (although he is carrying the extra poundage of a heavyweight fighter). The two of them use their competitive edge to motivate each other through the toughest sessions, strengthening a bond that is already forged from years of brotherhood. Lapin was ringside on the night of Usyk's first fight against Dubois, having fought on the undercard that night, and remains tightlipped over the champion's reaction to that bout: 'He didn't say it was an easy fight but I didn't hear him say it was very hard, so just say it was in the middle somewhere.' Advertisement When asked who he believes the two-year gap between the two fights favours more, Lapin says Dubois (perhaps having understood the question differently than how it was intended). Why? 'Because he gets this fight. It's very good for him that he got it. It's a big chance for him.' And though he is confident of Usyk leaving the Wembley ring with all the heavyweight belts draped over him once again, Lapin says there is always a chance that might not happen. 'It's heavyweight, so it can be just one second and everything ends — for both fighters.'

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