One of the greatest accomplishments in recent boxing history has been becoming undisputed in the four-belt era. Winning one world championship is difficult on its own but winning all four is an even tougher task, making it such an incredible achievement. While boxing fans recognize the skills and mental attributes that a boxer needs to become undisputed, perhaps it is time to change the structure of the sport and get rid of the 4 belts altogether.
The main issue with there being four main sanctioning bodies in the sport is having too many champions in each weight class. Every weight division has a WBA, WBC, WBO, and IBF world champion and most divisions have four different champions with one holding each belt. The IBO and Ring Magazine also have their titles but winning those is not considered necessary to become undisputed. The issue with having so many champions is that it defeats the purpose of sports in general. Every sport has some sort of championship structure to crown an individual or team the best at the end of each season. Fundamentally, this is why fans watch sports, to find out who is the best. Fighting sports, such as boxing, have an advantage when it comes to this considering the sport revolves around one-on-one combat making it easy to decide who is the best. However, size difference is an issue only fighting sports deal with which led to the creation of weight classes, and the question of “who is the best?” turned into “who is the best in each weight class?”. With boxing’s current structure, it is difficult to even answer that. There are multiple world champions in each weight class and sanctioning bodies seem to be more concerned with having each champion defend his title as opposed to having the champions fight each other to determine who the best fighter is.
The politics of the sport also create a major factor as sanctioning bodies seemingly cannot work together and instead constantly try to out-perform one another to prove which of the four is the best. This leads to champions being forced to defend their titles against lesser competition instead of actually having the best fighters in each division fight one another. The most recent example of this was Oleksandr Usyk being forced to vacate his IBF title only a week after winning the WBC belt to become undisputed. The IBF ruled that Daniel Dubois was the mandatory challenger despite Usyk already beating him in his previous fight before becoming undisputed. Usyk was forced to decline fighting Dubois because of his mandatory rematch clause with Tyson Fury. Therefore, Usyk had no choice but to vacate the belt, leaving the heavyweight division without an undisputed champion. While having a mandatory challenger does make sense, it is often used at the wrong time and only affects the sport negatively. Forcing Usyk to vacate seems unfair considering he never had a history of turning down fights, meanwhile, Tyson Fury was allowed to remain the WBC champion despite fighting Derek Chisora and Francis Ngannou who were nowhere near the top of the heavyweight rankings.
The four belt structure needs to be scrapped altogether, and there needs to be a single sanctioning body so that every division has a single champion and fans can definitively know the answer when asked “who is the best?”.
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