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Daniel Dubois' coach reveals key weapon he will use to dethrone Oleksandr Usyk and 'shock the world'
Daniel Dubois will emerge victorious against Oleksandr Usyk on July 19 – of this, his camp confident. But the linchpin to the entire operation might surprise you.
“It all comes from his dad,” Dubois’ strength and conditioning coach Samuel Otti tells me. “I think that’s the key ingredient to Daniel’s success.”
Mark Robinson / Matchroom Boxing
When Otti joined Dubois’ team in 2022, Dubois’ father Dave – birth name Stan – told him ‘to a T’ what the next few years would hold for his son: “What type of coaching Daniel’s going to have; what kind of team he’s going to have; the success he’s going to have; the wealth he’s going to have; the exposure he’s going to have.”
Before the location of the fight was announced, he accurately predicted his son would knock Anthony Joshua out ‘in spectacular fashion’ in front of a huge global audience. Ahead of the Usyk rematch, Dubois senior says his son is going to “shock the world”.
“He told me everything, and everything has manifested,” Otti says. “He does this all the time; he’s very intuitive. That’s why, when Daniel’s dad says, ‘This is going to happen’, it’s going to happen.”
The story of Dave Dubois
Dave Dubois’ history of premonitions dates back decades. As a Camden Market street trader in the 1980s, he identified a niche market for African and Caribbean posters. Soon after, he packed his posters and visited his father in New York, pocketing $4,000 in sales on day one.
Every other week, he began making the trip from south London to Harlem, filling his suitcase with posters rather than clothes. In three months, he made $1,000,000.
“He was sued by Warner Brothers,” Otti says, further illustrating the scale of the success. The company was upset by a poster showing Bugs Bunny smoking weed.
After securing his fortune, the father-of-11 stopped trading to focus on his children.
“I wanted to do it properly and on my own,” he told The Guardian in 2020, “Both mothers accepted the situation.”
Before Daniel was born in 1997, his father identified him as a future world champion boxer, and set about creating an environment to cultivate this vision. Dave Dubois would challenge his son to do press-ups on his fists for hours on end as a child – the consequent marks on his knuckles remain to this day.
The fruits of these intense early training sessions are now ready for harvest. Daniel Dubois is fiercely driven and single-minded in his pursuit of undisputed world champion status.
Poker face
“Daniel is an extraordinary human being,” Otti explains. “In a sense, he's always in camp mode, so he's constantly training. Daniel doesn't really do much outside of boxing – he doesn’t really socialise or go out, he is very disciplined. One of his hobbies is to train.”
For this reason, Otti has to keep close tabs on Dubois’ training load to prevent him from burning out. While other athletes need incentives to work out, Dubois needs encouragement to occasionally rein it in.
“With Daniel, he's got a poker face,” his coach continues. “He’s never going to tell you he’s tired; he's never gonna tell you he needs a rest; you have to use your intuition [as a coach] because he always wants to work. Sometimes you’ve got to put your foot down and say, ‘No, Daniel, today, have a rest’.”
Again, this mindset comes from his father, Otti says.
“His dad constantly drills [into him] that you’ve got to be hardcore,” he explains. “If you have a father like Stanley Dubois, whatever you want to do, you will become that person.”
Unshakeable mindset
A case study for Dubois’ champion mindset can be found in his preparations for the Anthony Joshua fight in 2024.
The fighter was completing a track session with Otti, tackling 10 rounds of 100m sprints against the clock. Most people would approach the tenth round with relief – only one more sprint to go. Daniel Dubois did not see it that way.
“Daniel kept on getting more or less the same time,” says Otti. “He has a competitive nature – his desire to win is so strong that he refuses to lose. We're doing the tenth one and he says, ‘Sam, how do I beat my time?’ He looked me in the eye and I saw he was being serious.”
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He goes on: “I told him, ‘Look at the finish line. Don't see the finish line as the end. Push beyond it’. Because what happens in life is, every time you see the finish line or you start to get close to a goal, you slow down.”
Dubois, after nine maximum 100m efforts, took two seconds off his time in the final round.
The camp
This mindset, inspired by Daniel Dubois and his father, has extended to the rest of the camp, according to Otti.
“[Dave] is an incredible human being,” he explains. “He's got everybody on their toes and he’s making sure that everybody is being the best they can be because he understands the magnitude of this fight. Winning requires everything so, in order for us to win, we've got to use every resource we have, and his dad has a major part to play in that.”
Dubois’ camp is bigger than ever for the Usyk rematch, with experts in physiotherapy, nutrition and a team doctor brought on board to maximise his chance of success.
“Everybody’s working in harmony, and it’s a beautiful thing to see,” says Otti. “Right now, everybody is going back home and working on themselves as well as working on their jobs. I’m trying to become the best version of myself I can be. The job is just manifesting itself now.”
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This could be why, when I visited Dubois’ training camp a few weeks out from the fight, the mood was calm yet supremely confident. Whoever I spoke to, there was no talk of ifs or buts, just when and how his hand would be raised.
“Daniel is a part of history,” his trainer Don Charles declared to the room. “This is the biggest fight ever, and all of us are involved in it.”
“The confidence comes from the work,” Otti adds. “If you work hard, you’re automatically confident. We don't know what Usyk’s doing in camp, but the mindset is to always do more than the other guy. You're going to make sure you give it everything in that camp. They say if you sweat more in training, you bleed less in the war. Every couple of hours, Daniel is drenching his t-shirt.”
Otti mimics wringing out a sodden shirt with his hands, then looks at me and nods. Less blood, more sweat and an iron mindset: Dubois is ready.
Watch Usyk vs Dubois 2 exclusively live on DAZN PPV, Saturday, July 19. Buy the PPV now here
