Tyson Fury has proven many times in his career that you can’t always judge a book by its cover or a heavyweight boxer by their belly, and he’s brushing off criticisms that he’s out of shape ahead of a planned comeback fight.
“Read a few comments (that said) I’m looking a bit hench — chubby, fat. Welcome to my world,” he said in a video released to social media. “Never been any different. I beat everybody with a fat belly, never been any different, never made any odds before. Why should it make any odds today?
“I weigh about 20 stone [280 lbs] at the moment. Probably get down to around about under 19 [266 lbs], maybe, for the comeback. Nice and loose and fast. Really looking forward to it. I’ve been away for a while, but I’m back now. I’ve had a year out, and if I box in the first quarter [of 2026], it’ll be up to 16 months out of the ring. It’s a long time for a 37-year-old, 38 this year. We’ll see if I’ve still got it.”
Fury (34-2-1, 24 KO) doesn’t have an exact date yet, or at least one hasn’t been publicly announced, but the former champion will return as a big star in the division and in the sport no matter what he does.
We’ve certainly seen Fury take longer layoffs and come back looking, visually, in worse shape than he does right now. After he beat Wladimir Klitschko in 2015, he didn’t fight again for two-and-a-half years, and was 29 lbs heavier than he had been in the Klitschko fight, which to be fair was also an abnormally low weight for Fury even then.
Fury was the heaviest he’s been in his pro career in his last bout, officially tipping the scales at 281 lbs for his second loss to Oleksandr Usyk in December 2024, which was 19 lbs heavier than he’d weighed for their first fight seven months prior. If Fury is aiming to weigh around 265 for his return, that would be right about what he was at when he faced Dillian Whyte and Derek Chisora in 2022, and just above his weight for the first Usyk fight.
There was really just a single notable fight where Fury’s condition seemed to genuinely, negatively impact his performance, and that came in his bizarre 2023 fight with Francis Ngannou. Fury weighed in just under 278 lbs for that fight and never truly looked like himself. He looked out of shape and like he hadn’t taken training seriously, and the latter was probably the bigger issue, because at 281 for the Usyk fight, he did lose, but he fought quite well, and he did very well in his wins over Deontay Wilder in 2020-21, coming in at 273 and 277, respectively.
