While Odlanier Solis hit the deck against Vitali Klitschko, it was a freak knee injury that took him out. Although a couple of talking heads said the Cuban came into the fight with a bad knee, the only bad thing was Klitschko's uncharacteristic lack of sportsmanship when he barked at Solis for dogging it when the man had, in fact, torn his ACL.As a sports fan having watched a variety of injuries in a variety of sports, I can tell you that one of the trickiest of them all is the good ‘ol ACL tear. Just in the NFL alone, I’ve seen Napoleon McCallum get spun 90 degrees on his knee until it practically exploded; I’ve also seen Arizona Cardinals kicker Bill Gramatica tear his ACL celebrating a field goal. The latter example just goes to show that no how good of an athlete you are (and with NFL kickers, I guess that’s debatable anyway), strange injuries can happen at just about any time.
That’s one reason why I just don’t buy all the talk about Odlanier Solis having some kind of significant prior knee injury going into his fight with Vitali Klitschko Saturday. No sooner had Solis legitimately torn up his knee at the end of the first round (which resulted in a loss for the Cuban, by the way), you had Lennox Lewis of the Epix broadcast team insinuating that Solis must have had a prior knee injury even though he had absolutely no inside knowledge to support such a claim. When a report came out Sunday that a Cologne Arena spokesman had backed up Lewis’ claims by saying they did know of a preexisting knee injury (which was later refuted by Solis’ promoter), it was then just generally assumed that Solis and his team had screwed the fans and the promoters by stepping into the ring that night as damaged goods. Even Dan Rafael of ESPN, who is usually smarter than this, suggested that there should be some kind of punishment for Team Solis.
Look, I’m not a doctor or a professional journalist, but if Solis had a knee injury so significant that he couldn’t last a round in the ring, how in the world did he get through sparring and his pre-fight physical? It’s not like this was some prelim bout in Haysticks, Kansas; there was a cavalcade of media present around both fighters leading up to a heavyweight championship fight. Solis probably had more people watching him work out for this fight than he’d had in all his previous fights as a pro combined. Not one of them noticed that he had a bad wheel? Seems at least one or two of them might have commented about a knee brace, a limp, something that hadn’t been there before. Also, from what I understand, the physical they put the fighters through is pretty exhaustive. Do you mean to tell me they can catch Ruslan Chagaev’s Hepatitis B in a prefight physical, but a damaged knee wouldn’t be detected? It seems like people are looking to find someone to blame for an incredibly disappointing fight rather than looking at it as just an unfortunate accident.
And let’s also not forget one of the bigger problems in boxing, which is that you’re only guaranteed a fight as long as you can make into the ring in the first place. If Solis was to cancel due to injury, Klitschko probably would just go ahead and fight Tomasz Adamek, and there would be nothing that mandated Solis would ever get another chance at the fight. Ask Derek Chisora what it’s like to have a Klitschko carrot dangled in front of someone, just to have it taken away. If Solis did have some kind of previous injury, what incentive would he have had to report it in the first place?
We all know how disappointing the night was for the fans and promoter, but let’s not forget that it was probably the most disappointing for Solis. Solis had a freak injury on the biggest night of his career that killed things before they ever got started. A bad situation doesn’t need to be made any worse by media types we look to for intelligent analysis (yes, even from Lennox) jumping to spurious conclusions.
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