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“And I wear a 45-pound vest on me, as well, in all of my exercises and everything I do to have the extra weight on me.”
Deontay Wilder appears to have been caught out.
Following his TKO loss to Tyson Fury in Las Vegas last Saturday, which saw Wilder’s corner throw in the towel in the seventh round, ‘The Bronze Bomber’ blamed his defeat on the 45-pound walkout costume he wore to the ring.
“He didn’t hurt me at all, but the simple fact is … that my uniform was way too heavy for me,” he said. “I didn’t have no legs from the beginning of the fight. In the third round, my legs were just shot all the way through. But I’m a warrior and people know that I’m a warrior. It could easily be told that I didn’t have legs or anything. A lot of people were telling me, ‘It looked like something was wrong with you.’ Something was, but when you’re in the ring, you have to bluff a lot of things. I tried my best to do so. I knew I didn’t have the legs because of my uniform.”
But, according to a 2018 interview with UFC commentator and renowned podcast host Joe Rogan, Wilder admitted to regularly training with a 45-pound vest to improve his conditioning.
“We want to activate the fast twitch muscles,” Wilder said. “You know what I’m saying? We do everything with rapid speed. If I am doing anything that consists of me moving my feet is sprinting. And I wear a 45-pound vest on me, as well, in all of my exercises and everything I do to have the extra weight on me.”
The interview is currently being circulated on Twitter.
In a December 2018 interview, Deontay Wilder told Joe Rogan that he wears a 45 lbs vest during training sessions. pic.twitter.com/SHjEWZxOyf
— Chamatkar Sandhu (@SandhuMMA) February 26, 2020
Wilder’s first fight with Fury in 2018 ended in a draw, and the 34-year-old has called for a trilogy bout with ‘The Gypsy King’ following his TKO loss to Fury last weekend.
Per Bloody Elbow’s Tim Burke, “Wilder confirmed that he would be exercising his rematch clause for a third crack at Fury in the summer. He won’t get as much money this time around though – the rematch clause that was agreed to offered the winner of this fight a 60/40 split in the third fight, as opposed to the 50/50 split they had at Saturday’s event.”