LONDON: A heavyweight unification title fight between Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk is off after talks broke down, the Ukrainian’s promoter said on Wednesday (Mar 22).
Promoter Alexander Krassyuk confirmed the failure to Sky Sports television although Fury’s co-promoter Frank Warren suggested the fight, which had been pencilled in for April 29 at London’s Wembley Stadium, could still be salvaged.
Usyk’s side indicated the WBA, IBF, WBO and IBO champion will now seek to defend his belts against Britain’s Daniel Dubois, the mandatory WBA challenger.
Usyk and Fury agreed late last year to fight for the undisputed title after Britain’s Fury retained his WBC title against Derek Chisora.
“The Usyk side pulled out of further negotiations as the Fury side never had enough (and wanted) to pull everything and all rights to their side,” Sky quoted Usyk’s manager Egis Klimas as saying.
“I don’t want to go into details as all negotiations were confidential but I will tell you one thing, when a fighter doesn’t want to fight he overprices himself knowing that the fight won’t happen.
“They most likely forgot that Usyk is holding the majority of belts in the heavyweight division and Tyson just has one,” he added.
The two sides had already reportedly agreed a 70-30 split in favour of Fury but other terms had yet to be decided.
Warren told TalkSPORT radio that he had received an email from Klimas confirming “Team Usyk is out of further negotiations regarding the April 29 fight”.
“We got that yesterday, that’s the first we heard of it,” said the Briton.
Warren said a rematch clause had been agreed but a sticking point was how the rematch money was going to be split.
“We want the fight, why can’t it be overcome? There’s no reason for this fight to be off,” he said.
