KSI’s former coach has suggested the YouTuber would actually have to lose weight if he wanted to be in with a chance of beating Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson – better known as The Mountain – in a boxing match.
Talks of a fight between the two celebrities kicked off when KSI – real name Olajide Olayinka Williams Olatunji – jokingly claimed he could beat the former strongman if they ever did battle it out in the ring.
The rapper later took back the ballsy statement, not least because Björnsson, who recently defeated fellow strongman Eddie Hall, is a whopping 10 inches taller and 61kg heavier than him.
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Even so, KSI’s former coach and pro boxer Viddal Riley believes it could happen – only instead of gaining weight, he thinks KSI, aka JJ, would ‘need to be lighter, not heavier’.
In a recent YouTube video shared on his page, Riley, who sparred with Hall ahead of his fight against The Mountain, explained that ‘size isn’t everything’, something he had to reinforce to JJ before his match against Logan Paul.
The fellow rapper said that a lot of western fighting philosophies are ‘very much based on size’, whereas on the eastern side of the world, there are fighting arts that are ‘designed to show how to defeat someone who’s bigger than you’.
He added: "There is no reason why JJ [KSI] can't get in the ring, pick, pull, pick, pull and just move, move, move.
“You've seen me do it with Eddie Hall so it can be done, and there's evidence of that with me sparring Eddie. I'm not saying that JJ is me, but I'm saying it can be done.
"For him to believe he can do it is not far-fetched thinking… He just would have to stay switched on.
“You can't get another one of them 'Logans', I call the uppercut the 'Logan', there's no way. But avoiding situations like that, I don't see why he couldn't pick and poke his way around Thor [Björnsson].”
He added: "151kg Thor weighs, he's 6'9". JJ is 5'11", you could squeeze for the six foot, but he is 5'11" and 90kg.
“Now I’ve always said that JJ’s best performances are south of 85kg. For him to be able to perform how he would need to against Thor – successfully, you know, dub it – he’d have to be lighter, rather than heavier.
"Thor is not going to go down more than he’s gone down already, he really lost a lot of weight to get into the realm of boxing.
“Will this fight happen? No, I don't think so, but it would be big, it’d be huge. It would be bigger than me sparring Eddie Hall, put it that way, and that was quite big.”
Well, if the fight were to ever go ahead, at least KSI knows who to turn to for training tips.
Topics: Hafthor Julius Bjornsson, KSI, YouTube, Sport, Boxing
Daisy Phillipson