Klitschko KO's Thompson!

Today in Hamburg, Germany, Wladimir "Steelhammer" Klitschko defended his IBO/WBO/IBF belts and defeated WBO mandatory challenger by 11th round KO.

The fight started off slow. Thompson's height, size, and southpaw stance took a little while for Wladimir to warm up to. In the 2nd round, due to a clash of heads, both fighters ended up with cuts above an eye. Klitschko began to unleash his right in round 2. After the 2nd round Wlad started throwing more punches that he typically does not throw, and those punches included body shots, and uppercuts. Thompson did land some good body punches on Wladimir throughout the first part of the fight and ended up hitting him more than most of Wladimir's opponents in the past, but the problem was those punches were not very hard and did no damage to Klitschko. Thompson also seemed to shut down after the 2nd half of the fight. This is either because he was tired or was reverting back to training partner mode(he once was Wladimir's training partner before his Sanders fight).

Klitschko's punches however were for the most part hard, and I was impressed with his new arsenal of punches that he threw. The fighters also took a spill with Wladimir on top in the 10th round, which made Thompson get off the canvas very awkwardly. Eventually with increased aggression by Wladimir and a good, hard right hand to Thompson's jaw at 1 minute and 38 seconds in round 11, Thompson was KO'd.

This was a great fight for Wladimir. This had much more action in a round than the entire Ibragimov fight. It also ended in a very crowd pleasing fashion, which is something I believe Wladimir wanted to accomplish. Klitschko now improves to (51-3, 45 KOs) while Thompson falls to (31-2, 19 KOs).

Here's a video of the actual Knockout.



and here's some after fight footage in German with an interview with Thompson...