Vasiliy “Loma” Lomachenko has closed the gym door for good at 37, ending a pro run as condensed and dazzling as any in the sport’s modern archive. The Ukrainian southpaw, who sprinted from debut to world champion in just three fights, announced his retirement via a reflective video message, thanking family, faith and the “clarity” that comes only after the final bell. His last appearance, a clinical 11-round dismantling of George Kambosos Jr. in Perth, placed the vacant IBF lightweight belt on his shoulder and served as a fitting encore to a career built on making elite opponents miss by millimetres.
Lomachenko’s résumé reads like fast-forward myth: Olympic golds in Beijing and London; an amateur ledger of 396-1; world titles at featherweight, junior-lightweight and lightweight captured in just 12 total bouts; and a mid-career murderers’ row that saw Nicholas Walters, Guillermo Rigondeaux and Jorge Linares systematically unravelled. Even his setbacks - a weight-drained loss to Orlando Salido in bout No. 2, a razor-thin decision to Teófimo Lopez, and a debated cards defeat to Devin Haney - came wrapped in caveats that never dimmed his pound-for-pound glow.
Watch Lomachenko's final fight vs. Kambosos here: Watch
Yet numbers alone can’t trace the mystique. At his peak Lomachenko boxed like time sped up for him and slowed for everyone else, pirouetting behind opponents’ elbows, landing in clusters from angles television struggled to catch. Trainers spoke of “matrix footwork” and fighters left the ring praising skills they couldn’t solve. It was athletic geometry rendered in 20-foot squares from New York to Macao.
With Loma stepping aside, interim titlist Raymond Muratalla is set to be elevated to full IBF champion, and a lightweight era he once ruled by sleight of hand pushes on without its most inventive craftsman. The records will note 18 wins; the memories will recall a brawler who compressed Hall-of-Fame credentials into a dozen years and re-taught boxing how far the human body and imagination could bend before breaking.
Thank you, legend!
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Image Credit: ESPN