Tyson Fury has revealed his wife suffered a miscarriage before he lost to Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk in Saudi Arabia in May.
Fury described how his wife, Paris, was six months pregnant when she lost what would’ve been their eighth child on the eve of his fight with Usyk, which saw him lose his WBC world heavyweight title.
An anguished Fury said: “She was six months pregnant. It’s not like a small miscarriage at the beginning – you have to physically give birth to a dead child, on your own, while your husband is in a foreign country. To go through that on your own isn’t good.”
Fury said his wife didn’t tell him about the miscarriage before the fight, but “I knew there was a problem” when she said she couldn’t attend the fight in Riyadh.
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He said: “I said to my brother ‘she’s lost that baby’. She never told me she had lost the baby, but I knew.
“When I got back I got the inevitable confirmation that it was gone, but she had kept it to herself.”
Fury added: “I could not be there for her in that moment. And that’s tough for me.
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“I have been with the woman for longer than I wasn’t with her, so it’s hard that I couldn’t be there with her in that time.”
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Fury was insistent his wife’s miscarriage had no impact on his performance in the fight against Usyk, which he believes he won but which was awarded to the Ukrainian by split decision.
“It’s not an excuse – hell no. I am a man of honour. I do what I have to do when I am in there,” he said.
The rivals will meet again on 21 December but without the IBF belt at stake after Usyk chose to relinquish it rather than make a mandatory defence.
Daniel Dubois is now the IBF champion and retained his belt last month when he beat Anthony Joshua at Wembley Stadium.
