Gennady Golovkin: ‘Turning 40 is not a verdict. I feel great right now’

For years Gennady Golovkin was considered too good to get a big fight. Like Marvin Hagler before him, the crowd-pleasing Kazakh known as Triple G tore through the middleweight division with an unsettling blend of patience, technique and bone-crunching power in both hands, knocking out 23 opponents in a row over one blistering eight-year stretch, unifying three of the four major belts and matching Bernard Hopkins’ division record with 20 successive title defenses.

Golovkin was feared, avoided and marginalized during his decade-long ascent from YouTube curiosity to bona fide 160lb bogeyman, finding himself on the raw end of the risk-versus-reward calculus that governs boxing’s matchmaking process. Denied opportunities by the brand-name stars and their promoters, he instead took as many as four fights a year against all-comers to stay in the public eye on the promise that if he kept knocking them over they couldn’t ignore him for ever.

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He was 35, a first-ballot Hall of Fame career in hand and nearing the edge of his prime when that golden ticket finally came in 2017: a long-awaited mega-fight against the Mexican superstar Canelo Álvarez that placed Golovkin at the top of a pay-per-view card in Las Vegas for the first time. It was the biggest match that could be made in the sport and, when it went off that September, managed to exceed the years of breathless anticipation and hype that preceded it. That is, until the ringside judges handed down a widely derided split draw that prompted deafening boos from the capacity crowd of 22,358 at the T-Mobile Arena and ripped away from Golovkin what ought to have been the defining moment of his career. Their