Celebrating Vasyl Lomachenko, boxing’s mesmerising genius

Lomachenko faces Teofimo Lopez in Las Vegas, a special fight that may test the Ukrainian like none before

That Vasyl Lomachenko is a fighting marvel has never been in dispute and next Saturday in his fifteenth consecutive world title fight he meets one more unbeaten boxer in the latest test of his ring genius.

No boxer in history has ever had to prove his brilliance so relentlessly and at such a unique and early stage in his development; Lomachenko first fought for a world title in his second fight, has so far won titles at three different weights and on Saturday he will fight for just the sixteenth time as a professional.

In the opposite corner will be New York's Teofimo Lopez, unbeaten in 15 fights, nearly a decade younger than Lomachenko and also the lightweight champion in the eyes of the IBF. This is a real and rare fight, arguably the trickiest of Lomachenko's career so far. Lomachenko holds the WBA and WBO versions of the lightweight world title. This is a very special fight, make no mistake.

Lomachenko has so far had to overcome unbeaten men, avoided men, dangerous men, men with far more fights and proven chins. The Ukrainian, who won two Olympic gold medals, has often played with is opponents inside the ring, stripping their ability and ambitions back to the bone. He has broken men in fights, forced them to quit, to simply shake their heads in bizarre resignation and refuse to fight. It has been both mesmerising and disturbing to witness.

Lopez is a real talent, nasty in the ring when he senses an ending and a lot smarter than he is generally given credit for. However, is he as heavy-handed as Nicholas Walters, as clever as Guillermo Rigondeaux or brave as Jorge Linares? Lomachenko made me watch the end of Walters, Rigondeaux and Linares through my fingers; the Ukrainian simply brutalised the trio of great world champions, broke their spirits, took their souls and hurt them.

However, in many ways Lomachenko is an old 32 and last year in London, in the weeks before his title defence against Luke Campbell, he was in a reflective and possibly worrying mood when I spoke to him. In the fight against Campbell he was good, but not brilliant and the final scores in no way captured the truth of the twelve rounds; Campbell lost, but it was a much closer fight than the final tally returned by the three convenient judges at ringside. Two of the judges refused to give Campbell a single round and that is a disgrace.

“I just want to enjoy life from now,” Lomachenko had told me six weeks before the fight, his voice low and weary. “I have been doing this for so many years. I have other things that I want to do.” It is the type of late-career statement that worries me. He likes to hunt and fish, to retreat, to get away from being the tiny Ukraine fighting genius, hero to his people and untouchable boxer. He beat Campbell in front of 18,000 at the O2 last August in his last fight and that gap, that forced break, might just work for Lopez. However, it could also work against Lopez, assuming Lomachenko is refreshed and has filled his bag with dead animals, when the bell sounds inside the boxing bubble at the MGM in Las Vegas that Bob Arum built.

If Lomachenko still has his eyes on a distant mountain where he can use his crossbow to slay a beast, he might find his reverie rudely interrupted by Lopez once the fighting starts. A focused Lomachenko will know too much and he is not old and jaded enough to be facing the night when he becomes an old man during the fight. He might even make it look easy, but I think Lopez will cause problems.

It is, there is no doubt, getting closer to the night when Lomachenko walks away and at that moment everybody in the boxing business will have to try and find a category for him. Arum, his promoter, often talks about him as the best he has ever handled and Bob Arum has handled every single significant boxer since the middle of the Sixties. And, yes, the style of the win over Lopez will matter in that final assessment, but until then my advice is to just enjoy the fighting genius from Ukraine.