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Tom Aspinall believes there may have been foul play in the boxing title fight between Oleksandr Usyk and Rico Verhoeven.
The UFC heavyweight champion was stunned and angered by the referee’s decision to stop the fight, awarding Usyk a TKO victory in their WBC heavyweight title bout. Usyk finished Verhoeven at 2:59 of Round 11—just one second before the bell. Many viewers at home, including the DAZN broadcast team, believed Verhoeven was ahead on the scorecards and felt the stoppage came too early. Aspinall shared that opinion.
“Wait, what? He stopped it? No way,” Aspinall said while reacting to the fight on his YouTube channel. “In a world title fight, you stop it after five or six unanswered shots? What is that? That’s a robbery. That looks fixed.”
Aspinall went even further, suggesting the former Glory kickboxing champion was deliberately treated unfairly, rather than it being a simple refereeing mistake.
“Two weeks ago, we were ringside for Fabio Wardley vs. Daniel Dubois,” Aspinall said. “That kind of situation happened multiple times in that fight. Wardley was sent back out with a badly swollen eye, a damaged nose, and a huge lump on his forehead. He’d been dropped five times and was still allowed to continue. That fight was stopped way too late.
“And here, Rico gets dropped to a knee, gets back up with 10 seconds left, throws a few shots, and they don’t even let him reach the end of the round? That’s a robbery.”
Many believed Verhoeven was on his way to one of the biggest upsets in combat sports history. Usyk—an Olympic gold medalist and multiple-time world champion—entered the fight as a heavy favorite, with odds as high as -2000. Verhoeven, by contrast, had only one previous professional boxing match.
“Boxing doesn’t want anyone else to succeed. It’s as simple as that,” Aspinall added. “They want traditional boxers—Olympic medalists who turn pro and stay undefeated. That’s the narrative they prefer. They don’t like fighters from other combat sports coming in. It’s nonsense.”
