The two men have plenty of history already of course, with Usyk twice dropping and stopping then WBA mandatory challenger Dubois in the ninth round of their showdown in Wroclaw, Poland back in August 2023 to successfully retain his WBA (Super), IBF, WBO, IBO and The Ring heavyweight titles to follow his back-to-back wins over Joshua and ahead of the two clashes with Fury.
Usyk arrived in Riyadh on Friday and will be at ringside on Saturday night, declining to give a prediction for Parker vs Bakole but stating to DAZN that he wants to fight Dubois next regardless in another huge undisputed clash.
The reigning IBF heavyweight champion was set to make the second (voluntary) defence of his belt at the Kingdom Arena in Saudi Arabia against a resurgent opponent as the chief support act to the undisputed light-heavyweight title rematch between Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol in what many were labelling as the best fight card in boxing history.
Rather than fighting for the IBF title as planned, Parker will now be defending his WBO interim belt won against Zhang last March, with the WBO confirming that the winner will become their mandatory challenger to take on full champion Usyk.
Bakole may not yet be a global household name due to a lack of huge fights, but he is very highly-rated in boxing circles and highly-ranked and will be eager to take this unexpected chance, although it remains to be seen if his conditioning will prevent that from happening with a lack of training time and whirlwind 48 hours that has seen him fly from the Democratic Republic of Congo out to Saudi at such late notice, not arriving in time for Friday’s weigh-in.
