“Sometimes I just force myself to smile,” he says. “Or I force myself to sing or to dance. But I don’t even know how to explain all of this. My children are asking: Father, why do they want to kill us?

“I just don’t know how to answer that.”

Within two days, Usyk was the new world heavyweight champion and he spoke with pure sincerity of his desire to celebrate by planting new trees and watering existing ones. “I want to live,” he had said.

“I really didn’t want to leave my country or my city,” he continues. “But at one point I went to a hospital where soldiers were wounded and getting rehabilitation from the war and they were telling me, asking me to go and fight for my country and for my pride. They told me that, if I go and fight there, I am even going to help our country more than if I stayed and fought in the war.

“I know a lot of my close friends are on the front line, standing and fighting, so all I am doing right now is supporting them. With this fight I want to bring them some joy in between what they do.”

Before his departure, Usyk was part of a territorial defence battalion in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and took part in armed patrols. “Every day I was there I would pray to the Lord, please don’t let anybody try to kill me,” he says. “Don’t let anybody shoot me and please don’t make me have to shoot any other person. But if I had felt any danger, or that me or my family’s lives were in jeopardy, I would have to.

“It took me only one day of the war to understand completely that everything I have, everything that I have achieved, all my belts, all my titles, I can lose it all in just one second.”

Dressed in a yellow and blue T-shirt that reads “Colours of Freedom”, Usyk also speaks about how he has kept in close contact with the compatriots he left behind to fight, which include fellow pound-for-pound great Vasyl Lomachenko. "He is good," Usyk says of his dear friend. “Loma is now a Ukrainian solder.”

Usyk has even had to watch footage of the house that he left vacant being ransacked by Russian soldiers.

“My family are not in Ukraine, but a lot of people I know and a lot of my close friends are inside the country,” he says. “I am in touch with them every day, I am asking them for updates.


“I want to hear how they’re feeling and that they are safe. I didn’t want to leave the country. I want to live there still. Straight after the fight I will go back to Ukraine.

“That house in Vorzel belongs to me, and it’s true that Russian soldiers went into the house, broke a fence and all sorts of different things. They made living spaces and stayed there for a while.”

When asked whether he may cut himself off from such troubling updates as the fight grows closer, Usyk shakes his head. “I’m going to be following every single day to hear what’s happening in my country,” he says.

“I don’t even think about him or whatever he wants to do, his new tactics or new trainers,” Usyk says of Joshua, who recently added Robert Garcia to his coaching team. “I really don’t care – I’m only thinking about what I want to do.

“When I fight, I don’t think about what I’m supposed to do, only about winning. We are working very hard and trying to be better in this next fight. We are making new goals and with the Lord’s help, yes, we are going to be better.

“Since I was 16 years old I prayed to the Lord, and every time I feel things getting very difficult for me, I thank him. I thank him for what he’s doing to me.

“I think that’s what puts me where I am right now. I believe someone is looking after me.”

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