“It’s like we’re racehorses. They race us until we drop and then they shoot us.”—Former heavyweight champion Tim Witherspoon

 

Two days after Vasiliy Lomachenko lost his lightweight titles to Teofimo Lopez in Las Vegas, he had surgery on his right shoulder at a hospital in Los Angeles.

 

“When he came in from the Ukraine for his last stages of preparation for the fight, he was having some difficulty with the shoulder,” his surgeon, Dr. Neal S. ElAttrache, told Yahoo! Sports. “It turns out he had badly bruised the rotator cuff and chipped a piece of cartilage, which we didn’t realize 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 OK, but it continued to cause him pain during the fight.

 

“We operated on him last 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.”

 

ElAttrache said the surgery was successful and he expects a full recovery.

 

When Lopez learned of the surgery, he didn’t wish Loma a speedy recovery.

 

“I was injured coming into this fight as well, if you want to talk about injuries,” he told ESPN, “but I didn’t make no excuses about it. You know what I mean? This is just part of the sport. You’re never going to come 100 percent into a boxing or any other combat sport. So I think by him doing that, as someone who was considered the number one pound-for-pound best boxer in the world and make that excuse, it just looks more bad on him than anything else.”