WHICH WEIGHT HITS HARDEST?

WHICH WEIGHT HITS HARDEST?

By Rachel Aylett

Whilst watching Sky’s recent coverage of the Charlie Edwards-Angel Moreno WBC title fight, I noted some remarks from co-commentators Adam Smith and Carl Froch, which troubled me. Adam said “you don’t tend to get many early stoppages at flyweight …. they go long and there’s plenty of volume.” Carl replied, “yeah, not massive punchers … when they step into the ring they expect to go the distance and they prepare for that.”

This rather irritated me as I didn’t believe it was true. Although we were watching a champion in Edwards who is not a power puncher, the flyweight division in the very recent past has featured known destroyers like Naoya Inoue and Roman Gonzalez. I felt that Adam and Carl were perhaps unwittingly insulting the “little men”. The only way to either confirm or deny this was to visit BoxRec and analyse some statistics.

Using the BoxRec world rankings, I calculated the knockout percentages of the top 10 fighters in each weight category. Before analysing the results on a weight by weight basis, I list the 10 fighters across all the weight classes with the highest knockout percentages, along with the 10 who have the lowest:

Big Hitters                          Shoe Shiners
Artur Beterbiev 100.0       Can Xu 11.1
Anthony Joshua 95.5         Tevin Farmer 17.1
Gervonta Davis 95.2          Tatsuya Fukuhara 21.2
Angel Acosta 95.2               Josh Warrington 21.4
Deontay Wilder 95.1         Takuma Inoue 23.1
Anthony Yarde 94.4           Edward Heno 26.3
Naoya Inoue 88.2               Hekkie Budler 27.8
Yuniel Dorticos 87.5          Simpiwe Khonco 28.0
Miguel Berchelt 86.5         Anthony Crolla 29.5
Josh Taylor 85.7                 Lee Selby 31.0

Interestingly, three British boxers appear in both lists, with Joshua, Yarde and Josh Taylor showing up as the biggest hitters and Warrington, Crolla and Selby appearing on the other list. Other points of interest are that three of the biggest hitters are semi-finalists in this year’s WBSS tournament (Naoya Inoue, Dorticos and Taylor) and that an Inoue brother appears on each list!

In calculating the scores for each weight, rather than use the average score, which can be influenced by a particularly high or low score, I have used the median, i.e., discarding the highest and lowest scores in each weight class. This gives a more realistic final figure. Here is the list, with the stoppage percentage alongside:

Heavyweight 73.5
Light-Heavy 69.2
Middleweight 68.4
Cruiserweight 66.8
Bantamweight 65.5
Super-Bantam 65.2
Super-Feather 62.8
Super-Fly 61.9
Flyweight 61.0
Super-Light 60.9
Lightweight 60.0
Super-Welter 59.2
Super-Middle 58.8
Welterweight 56.6
Featherweight 55.2
Light-Fly 48.9
Minimumweight 36.8

As you can see, the heavyweights do punch harder than the flyweights. In fact, they punch harder than everyone else too, with a clear lead at the top of the table. When you see Joshua and Wilder both in the top 10 list it is understandable why we are all so anxious to see them collide in the ring.

The four top positions in the list constitute four of the heaviest weight classes in the sport, with only the super-middleweights not in place. They are actually near the foot of the table, with only Callum Smith, Chris Eubank Jr. and Jesse Hart scoring over 70%. Indeed, this score will likely go down even further as Hart is moving up to light-heavyweight.

Although the flyweights are well placed in the list, perhaps predictably the two lightest weights, light-fly and minimumweight bring up the rear with scores well adrift of the other weight classes. Despite stoppage victories not being a prerequisite to entertaining or high class boxing, it has always been a bugbear of mine as to why we need one, let alone two, weight classes below eight stone. Fifteen weight classes would be perfectly adequate in boxing.