A perspective on your own

ITwo physically demanding tasks await Timo Rost these days. This Saturday, the 28-year-old professional boxer wants to win the eleventh comparison in his young career (nine wins, one draw) in order to climb further on the independent world ranking in the super middleweight division, from place 168 to the top 100.

He is the main character at the first boxing gala in Germany since the outbreak of the corona pandemic, which again allows a small contingent of spectators. Fifty eyewitnesses will watch a disused Wuppertal industrial hall when Rost steps into the ring with the Dutchman Gino Kanters; As soon as they have reached their places, they can remove their respirators from their faces in accordance with hygiene regulations.

A few days later, the Düsseldorf native wants to complete the underground cellar in the garden with helpers, for which he has already excavated a lot of soil at home in Remscheid. Then he can finally keep all the potatoes professionally, from whose minerals he believes to benefit enormously. “In the past I was often over acidified during training,” he explains, “that doesn’t happen to me anymore.” In this sense, his trainer Rüdiger May was obviously right. The head coach in Cologne’s Maylife Gym, a professional German cruiserweight champion himself, had given him the tip, and this time the critical boxer implemented one to one, which his coach had strongly advised him to do.

A self-made nutritional plan that revolves around the strength of the tuber and an event that is tailored to his well-trained body: this fits in well with the loner who tries his luck in his own way. Especially in difficult times for his sport, Rost wants to box himself through without a firm commitment to a promoter. A “free agent”, that is, an entrepreneur on his own behalf, who puts together the modules for success as he sees fit – from his trainer to a lawyer for all contractual matters to the laborious but very personal network of regional sponsors who have been protecting him financially for the past two years.

To date, the solo number is “definitely not easy,” as Rost assures. For the time being, he can offer his supporters a good mood and an athlete to touch, but little real value. “We sell the potential,” he says, including “Eva”. This is the Düsseldorf lawyer Eva Dzepina, who has long taken on management functions in his back. Last but not least, the student of health and exercise science also relies on his own capacities to understand the business of hand-to-hand fighting: “I’m not as stupid as a boxer seems to many.”

In fact, potential was already recognizable when rust was still frolicking in the Olympic boxing with shirt and helmet. Courage and timing for the offensive, a strong right and a good uppercut: even then, the robust youngster seemed to some observers to be more like a professional. His esteem success (university champion, third in the German championship) was not so serious, however, that the professional boxing stalls immediately tore around him. So at the age of 26, Rost invented himself as a newcomer from the DIY kit – and softened many a sponsor’s heart with his likeable appearance.

In the meantime, steel tube manufacturers from Neuss as well as the decision-makers of a telephone specialist and an Erkrath company for precision components are sitting in the front rows when their hopeful athlete climbs through the ring ropes. All of them and a few busloads of fans and followers are looked after by Rost until the first gong, as if he still wanted to serve everyone. This often leaves his trainer’s hair on end. “He doesn’t always get the direct link that sporting performance must be in the foreground,” the trainer warns, “but he sees the problem now. It has gotten better. “