THIS brings more literal meaning to figuratively deciding the outcome of what figures to be an extremely competitive world title fight with a coin flip.
Boxing News has confirmed that Panama’s Ignacio Robles, not New Jersey’s Steve Weisfeld, ultimately has replaced Miami’s Fernando Barbosa as one of the judges for the Oleksandr Usyk-Tyson Fury heavyweight championship rematch Saturday night at Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Weisfeld was thought to be Barbosa’s replacement, but the two camps eventually agreed to a coin flip administered early Saturday afternoon local time to choose between Robles and Weisfeld.
Members of both camps watched a Middle Eastern Professional Boxing Commission official flip the coin. The MEPBC, not the British Boxing Board of Control, has regulated the Usyk-Fury rematch, whereas the BBBofC has handled the entire undercard.
Robles and Weisfeld both flew to Riyadh on Thursday because Barbosa reportedly was ill and unable to travel.
Barbosa’s appointment attracted unwanted attention this week, however, because he is a senior vice president for Disney Latin America and a broadcaster for ESPN KnockOut, one of the company’s Spanish-language channels. Disney is the parent company of ESPN.
In addition to calling fights from ringside, Barbosa is responsible for acquiring licensing rights to boxing matches broadcast throughout Latin America. He regularly negotiates with promoters in that role, which makes his moonlighting gig as a judge particularly problematic.
Barbosa’s involvement was widely viewed as an obvious conflict of interests because ESPN has an exclusive content agreement with Bob Arum’s Top Rank Inc., Fury’s co-promoter along with Frank Warren’s Queensberry Promotions.
England’s Fury (34-1-1, 24 KOs) lost a split decision to Ukraine’s Usyk (22-0, 14 KOs) on May 18 at Kingdom Arena.
They will fight again Saturday night for Usyk’s WBA, WBC, WBO and IBO belts in the main event of a DAZN Pay-Per-View event (£24.99 in the UK; $39.99 in the United States). Usyk gave up the IBF heavyweight title, which now belongs to London’s Daniel Dubois, after he defeated Fury seven months ago.
According to bet365’s odds late Saturday morning, the 37-year-old Usyk is a slight favorite to defeat the 36-year-old Fury again in their 12-round rematch (-138/+110).
