Thor Bjornsson has hung up his gloves after talks broke down over a potential fight with heavyweight champion Tyson Fury.
Bjornsson, 32, started boxing in 2020 after challenging his strongman rival Eddie Hall to 'the heaviest boxing match in history'. He lost over 50kg and fought in three exhibition bouts before facing Hall, fighting to draws against former professional boxers Steven Ward and Simon Vallily before knocking out arm-wrestling champion Devin Larratt.
After dropping Hall twice on the way to a point decision in their fight earlier this year, Bjornsson challenged Fury to a fight after he retired from boxing in April. Fury even flew to Bjornsson's gym in Iceland in an attempt to goad his rival, but talks of the exhibition clash fizzled out and Bjornsson has now announced his retirement from boxing.
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"I'll admit there was a time when there was talks between Tyson Fury and I, his team and my team, there was build-up but that never went through," Bjornsson said on his YouTube channel. "Now I've made a hard decision and the reason why it took me so long to make this video was because this is actually a very difficult thing to talk about. I've made a decision to move on from boxing, to not compete in boxing again, to say goodbye to boxing and just not fight again.
"I had a good run, I did it for two-and-a-half years. It was nice to do so, because when I first started I had a lot of people not believing in me. I proved a lot of people wrong by working hard and I made some people proud. In reality, the passion was never there, it was all grind as I never really loved the sport. That's just the truth, but I have a lot of respect for the sport because I know how much work goes into it."
Bjornsson now intends to turn his focus back to competing in strongman and hopes to break a world record he set in 2019 for throwing a 25kg weight over a 20-foot-tall bar.
"It was like 'what should I do?' Spend the last few years as an athlete doing something I don't love or should I focus on my businesses and the things that I love, like lifting weights," he added. "I have two new goals, I have two new cats and I want to break one of my world records. The world record I'm trying to beat is the weight over the bar with 25kg, my record is 20 feet and two inches so I have to beat that to break my own record."
