Dmitry Bivol waits for his big moment in the shadow of Canelo and Putin

There have been times this week when Dmitry Bivol, the unbeaten and outstanding WBA world light-heavyweight champion, has been reduced to a ghostly figure in Las Vegas. Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez, his challenger on Saturday night, dominates boxing and so the layered and complex life of Bivol has been ignored.

The 31-year-old Russian is regarded by many as simply the next opponent for the imperious Mexican. Canelo, the undisputed world super-middleweight champion, is jumping up to light-heavy to presumably dispatch Bivol before returning to his regular weight class in September to face his bitter rival Gennady Golovkin.

Bivol, meanwhile, waits quietly in the shadows. He is asked mainly about his thoughts on Canelo and, far less often, about the war in Ukraine and how it feels to be a Russian fighting in America at a time when his country’s onslaught has devastated millions of lives. But, in a long and occasionally fraught conversation, the real story of Bivol unfolds.

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“My mother and father were born in the big country, the USSR,” he says wryly. “But my father was really born in Moldova and he spoke only Moldovan until he was 10. My mother [who is of Korean descent] was born in Kazakhstan. Then her family moved to Kyrgyzstan. One day, when they graduated, they met each other in Russia. They got married and moved to my mother’s home in Kyrgyzstan. I was born in Kyrgyzstan and lived there 11 years.”

They spoke Russian at home but Bivol felt most affinity with Kyrgyzstan. “It’s a great country. It’s not a rich country but it has great people, nice people. It’s my motherland. A lot of my life afterwards was in Russia but I love