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Mikaela Mayer secures win in Lightweight debut
Mikaela Mayer has firmly left the Super Featherweight division behind and is already aiming for the top players in the Lightweight division.
On Saturday in London, Mayer (18-1, 5 KOs) defeated last-minute replacement opponent Lucy Wildheart (10-2, 4 KOs) to earn the WBC World Interim Lightweight title. This puts her in a prime position to challenge the WBC World Lightweight title holder, Katie Taylor.
While Mayer decisively won the fight - especially bloodying up the face of Wildheart in the 10th round - this wasn’t a blowout for her. Mayer looked slow coming out of the gate in the first round, leading to questions about her conditioning in this new weight class. Wildheart certainly didn’t come in to lose this fight. “She was tough and durable,” Mayer said of Wildheart post-fight. She gave Mayer a run for her money, showing her willingness to trade punches on the inside. Mayer isn’t a knockout puncher, preferring instead to fight a more Olympic-style fight, so it was always a foregone conclusion that if she won it would be by points, and the judges’ scorecards reflected Mayer’s outworking of Wildheart, scoring 100-90, 98-92 and 99-91.
After the fight, a visibly relieved Mayer called out Ireland’s Katie Taylor:
“I do think that Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano are still supposed to go for their rematch, so assuming that happens, I’ll challenge the winner of that. …This is where I belong, I belong in big fights, I belong in world title fights, I’m in my prime, I feel great, so I want the toughest challenges possible - and right now, at 135, that’s Katie Taylor.”
I think Mikaela Mayer still has some training to do at this new weight before she’s ready to take on Katie Taylor, so I hope she’ll do at least one or two more fights in between if that fight ever comes to fruition.