On Saturday December 19th Vitaliy Rusal (24-1, 17 KOs), a famous Ukrainian boxer who fights under banners «K2 East Promotions» promotional company of Klitschko brothers will step into the ring in his home town of Zaporizhia. He will fight in an eight-rounder against Uzbek light heavyweight Abror Oripov (3-1-1, 0 КО). Rusal’s fight is expected to be the «specialty of the house» for boxing fans from Zaporizhia since Vitaliy was born in that city and is extremely popular there.

Vitaliy Rusal vs. Abror Oripov bout will be on the undercard of a huge boxing tournament billed «World Boxing in Zaporizhia. Champions league» which will be held in local Sport Palace «Yunost» on December 19th. In the main event Zaurbek Baysangurov (22-1, 16 KOs) will defend his WBA Inter-Continental light middleweight title in a clash against Frank Shabani (18-1-0, 6 КОs), a well-known boxer from Germany. A year ago Rusal already fought in the same arena in Zaporizhia. At that time he defeated a solid Hungarian pugilist Jozsef Nagy ((20-2-0, 14 КОs – the then record) by unanimous judges’ nod and retained IBO International Boxing Organisation Inter-Continental cruiserweight belt.

Rusal fought major part of his career as cruiserweight easily making weight at each official weigh-in. Half a year ago Vitaliy clashed against Marco Huck, current WBO cruiserweight titlist (27-1-0, 20 КОs), who was then EBU (European) cruiserweight champion. Rusal was the smaller fighter in the ring and lost. Then Vitaliy decided to go down to light heavyweight division, thus Saturday fight in Zaporizhia will be his second in the new weight class. It is worth while mentioning that his debut in light heavyweight division was quite a success – it was a spectacular fight in which Rusal managed to KO Lviv-based Vasyl Kondor (18-8-1, 5 КОs) in round 4.

For the upcoming Saturday fight Rusal trained under tutelage of Uwais Baysangurov, a prominent professional trainer. One can find celebrated Zaur Baysangurov among his disciples who happened to be Uwais’s nephew.

«By no means am I going to belittle merits of Alexander Lihter who had been training me all these past years. He taught me a lot of things and under his supervision I matured as a professional boxer – needles to say how grateful I am to him for that. However, after my defeat in Huck bout I understood that I cannot allow myself to stop my development – I have to perfect myself in boxing skill persistently.

In order to achieve that I had to make necessary adjustments in both training and boxing style. I badly needed a breakthrough. And I made up my mind to start working with a new trainer. I met Uwais Baysangurov and we discussed a lot of things. It was Uwais who trained me for the upcoming Zaporizhia fight. Based on the results of my training and the outcome of the forthcoming bout against Abror Oripov we shall see whether we will continue our co-operation. At the moment I am quite satisfied with how my preparatory period went off.

First of all, I am happy to have clear and definite program under which I have been training. We are working on some new and unorthodox things. Secondly, now I have a lot more of physical activity during workouts comparing to what I had before.

But I cope with my tasks – I never had any problems with discipline or persistence. I mainly work now on my tactics; I train a lot trying to improve my punching power. Uwais Baysangurov teaches me how to box with utter desire to spare no effort and how to make pressure on my opponent starting from the opening bell.

We worked a lot on my stance aiming at my boxing with hands raised up – it is important for power punching. I get a lot of pleasure from my training and our co-operation starts reaping the fruits of our labor. But you’ll see result this coming Saturday. And I am sure you will not be disappointed».