Carlos Gongora is fully focused not only on his second title defense fight, but on one day challenging Mexican superstar Saul Canelo Alvarez, who holds the World Boxing Organization (WBO), World Boxing Council (WBC) and World Boxing Association (WBA) super middleweight titles.
Gongora currently holds the IBO’s version of the title at 168-pounds.
According to the boxer, he is slated to return to the ring in September in Las Vegas – and he anticipates a trip to the United States in the next few weeks for training camp. This past Tuesday, he began training in Ecuador.
“It would be nice to fight for another belt, but my thing has always been to fight [in a unification] in the 168-pound division. In this case, in a big fight, we see that Canelo is a great boxer, he did a lot of work to stay in the position that he’s in and a lot of boxers want to fight him. I’m also joining [the list of people who want him]. Right now I am preparing for that [fight to happen at some point] and if it happens in the future, that would be the biggest fight I would have in my sports career,” Gongora told Alejandro Neira.
The undefeated 32-year-old indicates that he was originally scheduled to hold a fight in July, in Italy, but the entire event was called off.
Gongora (20-0, 15 KOs) became a legit player in December of last year, when he picked up a stunning upset with a knockout of undefeated puncher Ali Akhmedov in the twelfth round. He returned to the ring and retained the IBO belt on April 17 by stopping Christopher Pearson in the eighth round .
He prefers to compete for another title, but realizes that it could be a long time before he gets that type of opportunity. Canelo holds three of the belts, while Caleb Plant has the IBF strap. Canelo and Plant could potentially fight each other in a full division unification in September.
“The focus is always on fighting for another belt, unifying the belts. We are evaluating the pros and cons of going in this direction,” said Gongora.