Sergiy Derevyanchenko will have to wait a little longer in a bid to return to the win column.
BoxingScene.com has learned that the former three-time middleweight title challenger will no longer appear on the January 6 Vergil Ortiz-Fredrick Lawson DAZN show from Virgin Hotels Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada. An undisclosed injury suffered roughly one week ago during training camp forced the Ukrainian bruiser off the undercard, with hopes of a return on a forthcoming Golden Boy Promotions show.
The date would have marked Derevyanchenko’s quickest turnaround in more than four years. Inactivity has crippled his once promising career, as he has fought just once per year since 2020.
His last bout came in the leading candidate for 2023 Fight of the Year, a heartbreaking twelve-round, unanimous decision defeat to former WBO junior middleweight titlist Jaime Munguia. A twelfth-round knockdown provided the margin of victory on the cards for Tijuana’s Munguia (42-0, 33KOs), who will next face England’s John Ryder atop a January 27 DAZN show from Footprint Center in Phoenix, Arizona.
It remains unclear as this goes publication whether Derevyanchenko (14-5, 10KOs) will be healed in time to land on that card or if he will have to wait a little longer into the first quarter of the new year.
All five defeats have come in the last seven fights for Derevyanchenko, a 38-year-old Brooklyn-based boxer who represented Ukraine in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Derevyanchenko came up just short in an October 2018 vacant IBF middleweight title fight bid versus stablemate Daniel Jacobs at Madison Square Garden Theater in New York City. He fought in the main room for the same title one year later and was considered unlucky to not get the decision versus Gennadiy Golovkin in their October 2019 scorcher that was recognized by Boxing Scene as the 2019 Fight of the Year.
A more convincing defeat came in his September 2020 unanimous decision to unbeaten WBC middleweight titlist Jermall Charlo. The loss was followed by a 14-plus month ring absence before he dropped a ten-round majority decision to Carlos Adames. A win would have set up a 2022 meeting with Munguia; he instead settled for a comeback fight in a ten-round decision over Joshua Conley last July at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. More than ten months later, he fell just short versus Munguia.
The balance of Saturday’s DAZN show remains intact. Ortiz (19-0, 19KOs) ends a layoff of more than a year as he debuts as a junior middleweight. His scheduled 12-round main event versus Lawson (30-3, 22KOs) represents the first U..S. televised/streamed event of the new year.
Jake Donovan is a senior writer for BoxingScene.com. X (formerly Twitter): @JakeNDaBox