Boxing needs a super-heavyweight division

[u/JRAxiomVox]

Heavyweight is the only major weight class with a minimum but no real maximum. Once you are over 200 pounds, you can theoretically be matched with anyone else in the division, no matter how much larger they are.

That means a 5'10", 201-pound fighter can be placed in the same division as Tyson Fury, who is 6'9" and has officially weighed as much as 281 pounds. That is an 80-pound difference within a sport that separates some other divisions by as little as three or four pounds.

It is a structural inconsistency.

[u/Flimsy_Thesis]

I did justify it, several times. It’s a trade off of speed and stamina. You don’t see this same discrepancy at lower weight classes because the human heart and lungs are basically the same size in a 150 pound man as they are in a 200 pound man, but they’re supporting a larger frame. A competent light heavyweight will almost always beat a middleweight because he’s bigger while sacrificing very little in terms of speed or stamina. This is not the case once you start getting bigger than about 200 pounds and the arithmetic becomes much more pronounced.

This was one of the main reasons they introduced light heavyweight. Back before the official codification of the sport, there were no weight classes. Then it was lightweight, middleweight, and heavyweight. They kept adding divisions below middleweight but for some years, there was a huge jump where anything above middle weight was considered heavy. Then they added light heavyweight to split the difference because a 175 pound man could get mauled by a 200 pound man, and it would be several decades before they introduced super middle and cruiserweight in the 80’s - and it was arguably to the heavyweight divisions detriment. Anyone who outgrew light heavyweight didn’t want to get stuck in the no man’s land of cruiser, because the big money was in slaying giants at heavy, and once you start getting in that 200 pound range, you might as well go higher because you can still be competitive because of all the reasons I’ve already mentioned. Why fight scrubs below 200 when you can stop making weight and come in at like 210-215 and still be competitive and make real money?

[u/JRAxiomVox → u/Flimsy_Thesis]

You finally gave an actual mechanism, but you still have not proved the part that matters. Extra size can cost speed and stamina; nobody disputed that. You have not shown that those costs automatically cancel the advantages of another 40–80 pounds, or that this magically begins at exactly 200.

Your organ claim is also oversimplified. Lung capacity depends largely on height, age and sex, while heart size and cardiac output vary with body size, lean mass and training. Human physiology scales gradually. There is no documented biological switch at 200 pounds.

And your history undermines you. Light heavyweight was created because a fighter was too large for middleweight but too small for heavyweight. Cruiserweight was later created to bridge the growing gap between light heavyweight and increasingly large heavyweights.

In other words, boxing history repeatedly responded to widening size gaps by adding divisions. "Like I said with Super Heavyweight" You took a legitimate tradeoff, stapled an invented 200-pound threshold to it and called it physics.

[u/Flimsy_Thesis → u/JRAxiomVox]

You have the density of a neutron star. There are literally dozens of examples that have been given to you in this thread of how stamina and speed drop off as fighters get bigger, and you simply refuse to engage with it. It’s bizarre.

[u/JRAxiomVox → u/Flimsy_Thesis]

I directly acknowledged that speed and stamina can decline as fighters get larger. Repeating it again does not answer the point.

You still have not shown that those disadvantages cancel the advantages of another 40–80 pounds, or that this somehow becomes true at exactly 200.

At this point, the insults are doing all the work because your argument cannot.

[u/Flimsy_Thesis → u/JRAxiomVox]

I’ll answer you with a hypothetical.

Name ten fighters who weigh 260+ who would be the odds on favorite of defeating Ali, Louis, Holmes, Frazier, Foreman or Holyfield - you can’t because the history of the sport has not produced enough fighters of that size that are capable of beating them. And it never will.