24/05/2026
Rico Verhoeven didn’t get the victory tonight, but what he did inside that ring against the greatest heavyweight boxer on the planet today, deserves to be said clearly and without qualification, he won rounds. Multiple rounds. Against Oleksandr Usyk, a man who has beaten everyone placed in front of him.
Nobody expected that.
This is a man who stepped into only his second professional boxing bout, in a sport that isn’t his, against an unbeaten two time undisputed world champion, and he competed. He made it a fight. He made people watching forget, at least for stretches of it, that they were supposed to be witnessing a mismatch.
What makes this moment carry even more weight is what he brought into that camp with him. His mother passed away while he was preparing for this fight. He kept training. He flew to Egypt. He found old photographs of her standing at those same pyramids thirty years earlier and went to recreate them, because it felt like she had been pointing him there all along. He wrote to her publicly and told her she was his guardian angel.
He then walked out under the Egyptian sky and made the whole world take notice.
Rico Verhoeven spent twelve consecutive years as the undisputed king of kickboxing, unbeaten for 4,418 days, and tonight he reminded everyone that his story is still being written. The result didn’t go his way, but the performance was something nobody will forget in a hurry.
The King of Kickboxing. And tonight, genuinely something more than that.
