Dmitry Bivol: ‘I don’t feel like I am king today – just better than Canelo’

Deep in the basement of the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, and a very long way from Vladimir Putin’s lavish office in Moscow, Dmitry Bivol seemed the very opposite of his glowering and gloating president late on Saturday night. The 31-year-old Russian had just dominated Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez, the celebrated king of boxing, in a clinical and comprehensive performance.

Bivol retained his WBA world light-heavyweight title as he proved he was too big, too strong and too composed for Álvarez, who had moved up from the super-middleweights where he had established himself as that division’s first undisputed champion in history.

It was unsettling to imagine how Putin, a combat sports fan, might try to distort Bivol’s impressive victory into a glorious Russian triumph amid the carnage of war in Ukraine. Yet Bivol remained admirably restrained. When asked if he had replaced Canelo as the new world No 1 in the pound-for-pound rankings he smiled: “No. In my mind I just beat the guy who wanted my belt. He was a super-middleweight. Yes, he had a belt before at light-heavyweight [when Canelo beat Sergey Kovalev, another Russian, in 2019] but I don’t feel like I am the king today. I’m just better than Canelo today. I don’t even feel I am the best in the light-heavyweight division because I don’t have all the belts. I’m just one of the best.”

This sounded like the pleasing antithesis of Putin-speak. Bivol was just as modest when it was suggested that it might have seemed disrespectful to him that, despite being the champion, he had to walk to the ring first. The fame of Canelo runs so deep that Bivol, in a mockery of boxing tradition, was introduced before him. The Russian anthem, thankfully, was not played alongside those of Mexico and