Joyce Stopped in Bizarre Eleventh-Round Finish

Joe Joyce came back after sixteen months away saying he was fighting for legacy. He left the ring on Saturday night with a loss and his future in the sport genuinely uncertain.

Taking on the unbeaten Artem Suslenkov in the Russian's WBA continental heavyweight title defence, Joyce was stopped in the eleventh round in circumstances that will be difficult to revisit. As Suslenkov walked him down with a minute remaining, Joyce raised his right hand — a gesture that appeared to signal he did not want to continue. Suslenkov pressed forward and landed additional punches before the referee intervened and waved it off.

The manner of the ending added a painful dimension to what was already a difficult result. All five of his losses have come in his last six fights. That sequence began with the brutal back-to-back defeats to Zhilei Zhang in 2023, fights that raised questions about whether the accumulated damage of Joyce's style — the willingness to take punches in order to land his own — was beginning to catch up with him. He went away for sixteen months and came back saying he still had one more charge at a title.

The performance on Saturday will make that harder to sustain as a credible ambition. With five losses in his last six fights and a stoppage that came in a manner that will be discussed, the path back to world title contention is not obvious. The heavyweight division is not short of better options for the sanctioning bodies to consider, and Joyce's profile in the rankings has diminished with each defeat.