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One of the year’s biggest upsets and biggest knockouts came via the same punch.
Kiko Martinez entered his fight against IBF featherweight champion Kid Galahad on Saturday as a +800 underdog with BetMGM. Holding a career record of 43-10-2, the Spanish boxer was a former IBF super bantamweight champion, but hadn’t held the title since 2014.
Martinez wasn’t seen as the strongest pick for Galahad’s first title defense, but then he went ahead and did this to open the sixth round:
Galahad, who captured the vacant featherweight belt earlier this year with a win over Jazza Dickens, had seemed in control for most of the fight. That was emphatically reversed toward the end of the fifth round, when Martinez floored Galahad with a hard right hook.
Galahad managed to get up six seconds into the count, but all that set him up for was a one-punch finish in the sixth round.
The win makes the 35-year-old Martinez a two-weight world champion. Per Bad Left Hook, he said he’ll let his promoters decide where he goes from here, though a likely outcome is a rematch against Galahad, with unification bouts against other featherweight champs unlikely.