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With Olympic boxing officially wrapped up, trainer Rob McCracken will get back to work in the corner of Anthony Joshua as the unified heavyweight champion prepares for his upcoming title defense against mandatory challenger Oleksandr Usyk.
Earlier this year we reported on the scheduling conflict between McCraken and Joshua with McCracken serving as a coach for Team Great Britain which was running concurrent to Joshua’s training camp leading to this upcoming title fight. The Toyko Games are now finished though, and Anthony Joshua is eager to get his trainer back to work putting the finishing touches on his camp to have him as prepared as possible.
McCracken tells Sky Sports that he feels good about where Joshua is currently at and says they still have plenty of time to put in the necessary work together.
“He is doing fine, he’s where he needs to be. I’ll get back and there will still be seven weeks [before his fight], which is a long time in a 36-minute fight. We’ll get back, me and the team, the others [at Tokyo 2020] who work with AJ, so we can put the work together, get the sparring right, get the prep right.”
With McCracken now fully focused on Anthony Joshua’s task at hand, he’ll have to find fighters who can emulate Oleksandr Usyk’s southpaw style which won’t be easy consider Usyk is one of the very best technical fighters in the sport. Joshua will certainly have the size advantage, however, and we’ll just have to see if he tries to impose his physicality to offset the craft of the Ukrainian.