NEW YORK (AP) – Vasyl Lomachenko beat Guillermo Rigondeaux on Saturday night when Rigondeaux’s corner stopped the fight after six rounds because the boxer was complaining of pain in his left hand.
Promoter Dino Duva said Rigondeaux first felt pain in the second round and hurt it more significantly in the third. Duva said doctors believed the hand could be broken and were sending the 2000 and 2004 Olympic gold medalist from Cuba to the hospital for X-rays.
Lomachenko (10-1, 8 KOs) earned his seventh straight victory by stoppage and defended his WBO 130-pound title. And for the fourth straight time, his match ended with his opponent quitting.
“I guess I should change my name now to NoMaschenko,’’ Lomachenko said.
Rigondeaux lost for the first time in his 18 pro fights and was loudly booed afterward by a crowd that was supporting both fighters early in the match.
But it was quickly apparent that Lomachenko was too much for the 37-year-old Rigondeaux, the 122-pound champion who was moving up two weight classes for the historic match.
Long one of boxing’s best defensive fighters, even he couldn’t find a way to defend himself against Lomachenko’s onslaught.
“He frustrates them, he begins to come on, looks like he’s going to knock them out, they quit because they can’t answer back,’’ promoter Bob Arum said about the Ukrainian.
Lomachenko started cautiously but by the third round he had begun finding his way through Rigondeaux’s defense.
He was leading 59-54 on two judges’ cards and 60-53 on the other, and a fighter who does as little offensively as Rigondeaux was unlikely to make that up even if he could’ve continued.
Rigondeaux would have liked the fight at a lower weight but the height difference may have been a bigger problem. Giving up three inches to the 5-foot-7 Lomachenko, he frequently was caught when he tried to lunge forward for shots and couldn’t slip Lomachenko’s accurate punches, and when he kept trying to duck lower and lower Lomachenko even hit him on top of the head.
It was tense in the fifth round, when Rigondeaux was warned for hitting on the break and they jawed at each other after the bell sounded to end the round. But Lomachenko came back and scored with some solid shots in the sixth, and it became a bigger round for him when Rigondeaux had a point deducted for holding.
Moments later, it was over.