“He was very light on his feet and had a very good technique, but I was better,” Lukasz Wawrzyczek recalls of his moment of sporting rarity.
The Polish boxer, who now lives in the Channel Island of Jersey, did something the likes of Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua could not do - beat Oleksandr Usyk.
The rare loss for the then 18-year-old Ukrainian — who last week unified the world heavyweight titles after a split decision win over Tyson Fury —came in an amateur bout in Poland, where the pair were competing for their respective countries in November 2005.
“I got called up to represent Poland, but the Polish national team coach said to me, ‘Sorry Lukasz, but they don’t have any member in your weight division,” Wawrzyczek remembers.
“Back in the day I was a welterweight, they [the Ukrainian team] said, ‘Oh, we have a young boy, 18 years old, in the middleweight division, do you want to fight with him?’ That was Oleksandr Usyk.
“He was already a European junior champion. He was much bigger than me, but I said, ‘Yeah, why not, let’s fight,’ and we did.”
The bout was close — the pair were tied after the first two rounds going into a deciding third.
“My national team coach said, ‘Lukasz, it’s a draw. If you lose this round you lose the fight.’ So I went the whole round [going] forward and I won that third round and the fight.”
So how did he pull off the almost impossible and beat a man that would go on to win Olympic gold as an amateur before an unbeaten domination of the professional ranks at both cruiserweight and heavyweight?
“From the beginning to the end I was the person who was going forward,” Wawrzyczek says. “I think that’s the clue to win with southpaw boxers.
“He was obviously very good already in defence, however, in that third round everything that I could leave I left in the ring.”
Wawrzyczek had 220 amateur contests and fought for the Polish middleweight title in his 26 professional bouts, in which he registered 20 wins, two draws and four losses.
Having watched Fury’s defeat by Usyk in Saudi Arabia at the weekend he says the British boxer should have been more aggressive.
“If you’re fighting a southpaw you have to attack him, you can’t give him any space to win. He [Fury] was [going] a little bit backwards and that’s why I think he lost the fight.
“My strategy if I was training Tyson Fury would be very similar to the situation to Anthony Joshua had in his fight against Usyk - he did one round like that and he won that round, but he stopped attacking him, that’s why he lost.
“Tyson Fury’s huge, he’s massive, he’s much bigger than Usyk, so he could be that person.”
After a decade in the amateur ranks and another decade as a professional Wawrzyczek now works as a fitness coach and has been in Jersey for nine years.
His path has never crossed with Usyk’s since that day almost 19 years ago, but Wawrzyczek feels the pair would get on.
“If I met him again I think we would be good friends,” he says. “He’s funny, I’m funny, and it would be amazing to bring him here to Jersey.”
