Claressa Shields Clarifies Statement About Glove Scandal
Recently, 3Kings Boxing reported on undisputed middleweight champion Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (14-0, 2 KO’s) verbally roasting WBA super lightweight champion Rolando Romero. He called himself coming to her aid when former fighter Arturs Ahmetovs leaked footage of himself knocking Shields down in sparring roughly five years ago. Regarding the knockdown, T-Rex made a big fuss about the lack of padding in the glove.
So much so, that it seemed that Shields was insinuating that there was some funny business at hand. Now however, during a brief Q&A with Fight Hype, the two-time Olympic gold medalist is walking that statement back just a bit.
“And this is what I want to clear up: I am not saying that the coach took the gloves and cut the padding out of them because I would have noticed that. I am not saying that. I am saying that he purposefully had his fighter use gloves that he knew had very little padding, 100%! And he had his fighter, who was a man, use them against me.”
STILL NO LOVE IN THE CITY
Where Shields polished her previous statement, she would double down on her sentiments to her haters and naysayers.
“People are such haters of me, ‘oh we are finally glad that she finally got dropped, we’re so glad that she got humbled.’ It’s like, first of all, I never got humbled! It was five years ago, I don’t care about the video. I would whoop Artur’s ass now, still. Get in the ring and spar him again. I said something to Rolly because he brought more attention to the video and I let him know, too. I will spar against him too and I will really fuck him up!”
“So it’s like five years ago didn’t stop what I’m doing and what I have done. It’s just so stupid . . . It’s a video of me getting dropped in sparring five years ago and they’re getting hard off of it. Like, ‘oh yes, this is making me feel so good! This girl who talks about sparring and talks about she spars men, yeah, she got dropped, ahhhh!’ Those guys are weird.”
NOW WHAT?
The spirit of the accusation has a whole lot less bite under this guise. Here, it sounds as if the gloves could have been well-weathered, an unusual brand, horse hair or any manner of outcome that doesn’t involve outright duplicity. Or, maybe there was some measure of treachery in play.
In either case though, Shields’ restructured statement seems to place Arthur and his crew back in the realm of reasonable fair play. Which makes the original outrage and subsequent tirades a bit more quizzical. At the end of the day though, this all is quickly becoming a case of water under the bridge. Therefore, it will be interesting to see what is next on the fight schedule for T-Rex. Ideally, it’s not another Twitter beef!
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