Report: Fury vs. Wilder 3 likely to be postponed due to COVID outbreak
It looks like there won’t be two high-profile combat sports trilogies taking place in Las Vegas in July.
Just over two weeks out from the heavyweight trilogy showdown between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder, it looks as if we’ll have to wait a little longer for that rivalry to reach its conclusion.
ESPN’s Mike Coppinger reported on Thursday that an outbreak of COVID-19 within Tyson Fury’s camp is likely to postpone the matchup from July 24th to potentially September. Top Rank Boxing, which is co-promoting this event, did not officially announce any changes to the fight date.
“We continue to monitor the health status of Tyson and his team, and the status of the event has not changed to date,” a statement from Top Rank said.
Fury (30-0-1, 21 KOs) is the WBC heavyweight champion after taking the belt from Wilder with a dominant TKO in February of 2020. His first fight with Wilder in December 2018 ended in a controversial draw, although the biggest memory out of that bout was Fury incredibly recovering from a 12th round knockdown against one of the sport’s hardest hitters.
Neither Fury nor Wilder (42-1-1, 41 KOs) has fought since their rematch. There was a clause enacted by Wilder’s team for the immediate trilogy, but the pandemic shut those plans down for the rest of last year, and when Fury and Top Rank tried to move on from the matchup by claiming the clause was invalid, Wilder’s team took the case to arbitration. Just as it looked like Fury would have an undisputed title fight with Anthony Joshua, the judge ruled in favor of Wilder and thus that’s why the trilogy is happening.
If the fight does get bounced to September, it would be the same month as the soon to be announced Anthony Joshua vs. Oleksandr Usyk bout in London.