Deontay Wilder’s costume continues to look like a way to dress up an excuse.
A few days after blaming a 40-pound suit of nuts, bolts, batteries and armor for his loss to Tyson Fury, a video surfaces of him talking about how he trains in vests that weigh about 45 pounds, give or take a battery.
“We want to activate the fast-twitch muscles,” Wilder said on the The Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Dec. 10, 2018. “We do everything with rapid speed. If I’m doing anything that consists of me moving my feet, it’s sprinting.
“Now, I wear a 45-pound vest on me as well as doing all my exercises and everything that I do to have that extra weight on me.”
But that extra weight, minus about five pounds, was apparently too much for Wilder in the dressing room, the walk to the ring and up the steps.
It left him, he said, with weakened legs and vulnerable to the bigger Fury, whose two hands landed like 40 pounds each in dropping Wilder twice, in the third round and again in the fifth at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand. In a timely act of mercy, assistant trainer Mark Breland threw in the towel in the seventh.
“He didn’t hurt me at all, but the simple fact is that my uniform was way too heavy for me,’’ Wilder said a couple of days after his first loss. “I didn’t have no legs from the beginning of the fight. In the third round, my legs were just shot all the way through.”
Message to Wilder: Get rid of the suit. Get rid of the excuse. There’s no costume that can disguise it anymore.