Teofimo Lopez reacts after doctor reveals Vasyl Lomachenko had shoulder injury going into their fight and has now undergone surgery
Vasyl Lomachenko has undergone shoulder surgery following his defeat to Teofimo Lopez on Saturday.
The 23-year-old American dethroned Loma with a brilliant boxing display, though many questioned why the Ukrainian struggled to get into the fight in the first seven rounds.
Most decided to give credit for Lopez for outboxing the Ukrainian, however now another reason has been suggested.
Lomachenko's surgeon Dr. Neal ElAttrache told he performed a shoulder procedure on the 32-year-old two days after the fight.
ElAttrache previously operated on Loma back in 2018 when he dislocated his shoulder in the win over Jorge Linares.
The doctor explained that issues had resurfaced during camp, so he twice administered injections to the boxer.
ElAttrache told : “For his last stages of preparation for the fight, he was having some difficulty with the shoulder.
"It turns out he had badly bruised the rotator cuff and chipped a piece of cartilage, which we didn’t realise at the time.
"But we knew he’d badly bruised the rotator cuff and badly bruised the bone where the rotator cuff attaches to the shoulder.
"That was roughly six weeks before the fight and we got him to where he was comfortable enough to train.
"He said he was able to train okay, but it continued to cause him pain during the fight.
"We operated on him [on Monday] night and he had what we call a hemorrhagic thickened bursitis.
"That’s the tissue that lubricates and cushions the rotator cuff, which is where we had treated him and injected him before the fight.
"On the inside of the shoulder where he had previously dislocated the shoulder, he had chipped the cartilage on the inside of the socket.
"That was right next to the [previous] repair so I did a small touch-up of the repair so I could cover up the bare cartilage in the front of the shoulder.”
Lomachenko's manager Egis Klimas said that father and trainer Anatoly Lomachenko wanted them to withdraw from the bout because of the injury.
However, Loma refused and threatened to retire if the fight did not happen.
"We lost one week of training," Klimas told .
"We lost one week of sparring because the doctor forbid him to do much for a week after the injection.
Lopez was quick to respond upon hearing all of this.
He told ESPN: "I was coming into this fight injured as well, if you wanna talk about injuries, but I didn't make no excuses about it.
"I think that by him doing that, as someone who was considered the number one, pound-for-pound, best boxer in the whole world, to use that excuse, it just looks more bad on him than anything else."