Wladimir Klitschko

Origins and early life

Wladimir Klitschko was born on 25 March 1976 at Semipalatinsk in Soviet Kazakhstan, the younger son of Volodymyr Rodionovych Klitschko, a Soviet air force officer, and the site records him through the same paternal grandmother as his elder brother Vitali: Tamara Yukhimivna Etinzon, born at Smila in the Cherkasy region, a Jewish schoolteacher hidden by her husband Rodion Klitschko during the German occupation, whose brother Anatoli Etinzon was killed at the front in 1943.

Work and career

The detailed filiation comes from Ukrainian genealogical research relayed by the press rather than from an archival act, and this fiche says so. His father served at Chernobyl after the 1986 disaster and died of cancer in 2011. Wladimir won the Olympic super-heavyweight gold medal at Atlanta in 1996, turned professional the same year, and took the WBO heavyweight title in 2000. After two damaging defeats he rebuilt his career with the trainer Emanuel Steward, regained the IBF title in 2006 and went on to hold the IBF, WBO, WBA and IBO belts simultaneously, with a second reign of nine and a half years and twenty-three consecutive title defences, one of the longest in the history of the division, ending with his loss to Tyson Fury in 2015.

He holds a doctorate in sports science, and he and Vitali never fought each other, having promised their mother they would not. Since the Russian invasion of February 2022 he has served in Ukraine's territorial defence and campaigned abroad for his country.