Artur Beterbiev is injured, and his scheduled June 1 fight with Dmitry Bivol will be postponed.
Turki Alalshikh confirmed the news this evening. The rest of the June 1 card, featuring the Queensberry vs Matchroom 5v5 series, will go on as planned.
It’s not a new story for boxing fans, who have seen the 39-year-old Beterbiev fight just 20 times in an 11-year pro career partially because repeated injuries issues have been a plague on his activity. There were other reasons, too, but any Beterbiev fight seems about a 50/50 bet to actually happen on its originally scheduled date at this point, and this one won’t.
Bivol (22-0, 11 KO) and Beterbiev will be fighting for the undisputed light heavyweight championship, as Bivol holds the WBA title and Beterbiev owns the WBC, IBF, and WBO belts. It’s a long-awaited fight and one of the best to be made in all of boxing, so fans will be ready whenever Artur is.
The June 1 main event will now be Deontay Wilder vs Zhilei Zhang, both coming off of losses but also figuring to be such a potentially fascinating style matchup with two big-hitting heavyweights that this doesn’t matter as much as it normally might.
Beterbiev vs Bivol was already not going to be part of the pay-per-view portion of the show, as the fight was to air exclusively on ESPN+ in the United States, with the remainder of the show going through DAZN PPV, an odd set-up that now doesn’t even matter, it’s just a DAZN PPV.