Gennady Golovkin: ‘Turning 40 is not a verdict. I feel great right now’

Veteran middleweight champion ready for one last run at the top, fighting Ryta Murata this weekend before potential rematch with old foe Canelo Alvarez

For years Gennady Golovkin was considered too good to get a big fight. Like Marvin Hagler before him, the crowd-pleasing Kazakh known as Triple G tore through the middleweight division with an unsettling blend of patience, technique and bone-crunching power in both hands, knocking out 23 opponents in a row over one blistering eight-year stretch, unifying three of the four major belts and matching Bernard Hopkins' division record with 20 successive title defenses.

Golovkin was feared, avoided and marginalized during his decade-long ascent from YouTube curiosity to bona fide 160lb bogeyman, finding himself on the raw end of the risk-versus-reward calculus that governs boxing's matchmaking process. Denied opportunities by the brand-name stars and their promoters, he instead took as many as four fights a year against all-comers to stay in the public eye on the promise that if he kept knocking them over they couldn't ignore him for ever.