It’s been years since Adonis Stevenson was first ordered to fight his mandatory challenger, but the WBC light heavyweight champion appears to do that at the end of the year.
In response to a fan asking on the status of Stevenson’s next fight, WBC President Mauricio Sulaiman wrote on Twitter that Stevenson will fight interim champion Oleksandr Gvozdyk on December 1 in Montreal. The fight has not been officially announced as of this writing.
After years of not fighting his mandatory challenger Eleider Alvarez, the WBC issued an unofficial four-man tournament involving Stevenson, Gvozdyk, Badou Jack and Mehdi Amar. Gvozdyk defeated Amar in March to win the vacant interim WBC title while Stevenson fought Jack to a draw in Toronto in May. Despite a rematch between Stevenson and Jack being possible, the more important bout to getting the mandatory challenger fight out of the way is the fight against Gvozdyk.
Stevenson had been the WBC champion since 2013, but had not fought his mandatory challenger in years, which was Alvarez for the past couple of years. When Sulaiman ordered Alvarez to fight for the interim title before getting a chance to fight Stevenson, Alvarez withdrew from the fight and instead going for Sergey Kovalev’s WBO light heavyweight title. Alvarez ended up winning the WBO title with a seventh-round knockout in Atlantic City.
Although the fight is not official, if the Stevenson vs. Gvozdyk fight were to take place in Montreal as originally stated by Sulaiman, it would most likely take place at the Bell Centre, the venue where Stevenson has fought in Montreal since 2009.
