A Closer Look at Robin Safar, Poised to Make Waves in the Cruiserweight Division

Sergey Kovalev was on everyone’s pound-for-pound list during his long reign as a world light heavyweight champion. However, Robin Sirwan Safar was hardly intimidated when he met Kovalev in a cruiserweight match at Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 18, 2024. Safar, who turns 33 at the end of next month, had youth on his side, but this would be his first 10-round fight.

If anyone was intimated, it should have been Kovalev.

Safar was comfortably ahead on two of the scorecards entering the final round and then put an exclamation point on his performance by smashing “Krusher” to the canvas in the final seconds of the fight. It was a big upset, but no shock within the Las Vegas boxing fraternity where Safar’s work as a sparring partner had stamped him as one of the city’s hardest punchers. Many of those sparring sessions were with heavyweights such as Jared Anderson and Efe Ajagba, but he also worked as a sparring partner for Jake Paul: “just a regular guy,” he says.

Safar, who brings an 18-0 (13 KOs) record into his next fight on Nov. 8 in Fort Worth, Texas, was born in Sweden and raised in a suburb on the outskirts of Stockholm, the son of an Iraqi immigrant barber and a Swedish mother. “Culturally speaking, my [immigrant-dense] neighborhood was like a third world country,” he told podcaster Nestor Gibbs. Raised on the streets when his father left at age 11, Safar got into trouble (he won’t elaborate) in his late teens and was warehoused in a detention facility.

As an amateur, Safar was a Swedish national champion at light heavyweight and super heavyweight. Turning pro in 2017, he had his first seven fights in Sweden before heading off to Las Vegas where he hooked up with trainer Ibn Cason, the younger brother of former heavyweight champion Hasim Rahman.

He hasn’t been back to Sweden since arriving here. What keeps him grounded, outside boxing, is his 3-year-old daughter. Asked if he has any hobbies, Robin furrowed his brow, considering it a queer question to ask of a single dad.

Two fights before meeting Sergey Kovalev, Safar suffered a torn biceps that required surgery. He tore it with the first punch he threw in a bout that lasted 72 seconds. He stopped his opponent with a body punch.

His upset over Sergey Kovalev was overshadowed by other happenings on the same card. It was a supporting bout underneath the first meeting between Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury and there were two other title fights on the card, one of which was the rematch between Jai Opetaia and Mairis Briedis.

Although Opetaia has been matched very carefully since that bout, the undefeated Aussie is widely considered the most talented cruiserweight on the planet, albeit not in the eyes of Robin Safar who reserves that honor for himself. “I would love to fight him,” he says.

Safar says that certain promises were made to him by Queensberry Promotions honcho Frank Warren if he got past Kovalev and that those promises weren’t kept. However, he was pursued by Golden Boy and believes that Oscar De La Hoya’s company (which also promotes cruiserweight title-holder Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez) was the best option for him. “It’s the best company out there,” he says.

Signing with Golden Boy, however, didn’t thrust Safar out of the shadows. His debut with Golden Boy was in a preliminary match on a show in Cancun, Mexico. He stopped Texas journeyman Roberto Silva in five rounds.

Likewise, his forthcoming fight in Texas against Michigan’s little-known Derick Miller Jr (18-0-1, 10 KOs) is a preliminary affair, buried underneath the super welterweight contest between Vergil Ortiz Jr and Erickson Lubin. Safar vs Miller isn’t even on the main portion of the DAZN telecast although we suspect it will get bumped up now that the co-feature between Floyd Schofield and Jojo Diaz got scrapped when Schofield suffered a wrist injury in sparring.

Golden Boy obviously thinks that Robin Sirwan Safar needs “marinating” from the standpoint of enhancing his marketability. Skill-wise, however, those in the know would tell you that Safar, currently ranked #5 by the WBO and #9 by the IBF, is ready to make waves right now.

Robin acknowledges that he misses his parents, his sibling (a younger sister), his cousins, and his friends from the old neighborhood but says when he finally returns to Sweden it will be as a world champion.

We wouldn’t bet against it.

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