{"id":1072752,"date":"2026-07-06T21:23:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T21:23:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1072752\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T21:23:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T21:23:12","slug":"dmitry-bivol-ordered-to-defend-light-heavyweight-titles-against-callum-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1072752\/","title":{"rendered":"Dmitry Bivol ordered to defend light heavyweight titles against Callum Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\">Unified light heavyweight champion Dmitry Bivol has been ordered to defend his titles against his mandatory challenger Callum Smith by the WBO.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">BoxingScene reported earlier this month that Bivol, who recently returned with a win over Michael Eifert in May, after a year\u2013plus absence connected to back surgery, had alerted the WBO of his decision to face Smith next. There had been reports of Bivol facing Artur Beterbiev in a trilogy bout, after their first two razor-close encounters left them one-a-piece, but Bivol has opted to keep his WBO title and face Smith.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unified light heavyweight champion Dmitry Bivol has been ordered to defend his titles against his mandatory challenger Callum&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1072753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4108],"tags":[1935,4496,4495,22403,21853,79,16,15],"class_list":["post-1072752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-boxing-news","tag-boxingscene","tag-callum-smith","tag-dmitry-bivol","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116875140005738228","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1072752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1072753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1072752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1072752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1072752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}