Boxing Weight Classes: All 17 Divisions in Stone and Pounds
The boxing weight classes used in Britain, from minimumweight to heavyweight, with every limit in stone, pounds and kilograms and the names each body uses.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Boxing Rules & Scoring26 min read
- Professional divisions
- 17
- Flyweight limit
- 8st (112 lb)
- Welterweight limit
- 10st 7lb (147 lb)
- Heavyweight starts above
- 14st 4lb (200 lb)
Eight stone. That is the figure the National Sporting Club's committee set against the word flyweight in Covent Garden in 1909, and a flyweight stepping on the scales at a British Boxing Board of Control weigh-in today must still be at or under it. Most of the sport's limits were made the same way: round numbers in stone, fixed in London, translated afterwards into pounds for America and kilograms for everyone else.
Professional boxing has seventeen weight classes. They run from minimumweight, with a ceiling of 105 lb (7st 7lb, 47.6 kg), to heavyweight, which begins above 200 lb (14st 4lb, 90.7 kg) and has no ceiling at all. Welterweight is 147 lb, or 10st 7lb. Middleweight is 160 lb, or 11st 6lb. A boxer has to weigh in at or below the limit of the division he is fighting in, and nothing stops him weighing less. The World Boxing Council also sanctions an eighteenth class, bridgerweight, between 200 lb and 224 lb. The IBF and WBO ignore it and there is no British title at it, which is why this page, like most lists, counts seventeen.
All seventeen boxing weight classes in order, in stone, pounds and kilograms
The limits are defined in pounds. Stone is the unit a British timekeeper or master of ceremonies will read out, and kilograms are a conversion, rounded here to one decimal place. The names in the first column are the ones the Board of Control uses; the alternatives are dealt with further down.
| Division | Pounds | Stone | Kilograms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minimumweight | 105 lb | 7st 7lb | 47.6 kg |
| Light-flyweight | 108 lb | 7st 10lb | 49.0 kg |
| Flyweight | 112 lb | 8st | 50.8 kg |
| Super-flyweight | 115 lb | 8st 3lb | 52.2 kg |
| Bantamweight | 118 lb | 8st 6lb | 53.5 kg |
| Super-bantamweight | 122 lb | 8st 10lb | 55.3 kg |
| Featherweight | 126 lb | 9st | 57.2 kg |
| Super-featherweight | 130 lb | 9st 4lb | 59.0 kg |
| Lightweight | 135 lb | 9st 9lb | 61.2 kg |
| Super-lightweight | 140 lb | 10st | 63.5 kg |
| Welterweight | 147 lb | 10st 7lb | 66.7 kg |
| Super-welterweight | 154 lb | 11st | 69.9 kg |
| Middleweight | 160 lb | 11st 6lb | 72.6 kg |
| Super-middleweight | 168 lb | 12st | 76.2 kg |
| Light-heavyweight | 175 lb | 12st 7lb | 79.4 kg |
| Cruiserweight | 200 lb | 14st 4lb | 90.7 kg |
| Heavyweight | Over 200 lb | Over 14st 4lb | Over 90.7 kg |
Five of the seventeen limits fall on a whole number of stones: flyweight at eight, featherweight at nine, super-lightweight at ten, super-welterweight at eleven, super-middleweight at twelve. Add the two half-stones, welterweight at 10st 7lb and light-heavyweight at 12st 7lb, and the British origin of the scale is hard to miss. In pounds the same numbers look arbitrary. Nobody inventing a system in pounds would have chosen 147.
Checking a fighter against the table
A boxer announced at "ten stone six" for a title fight is a welterweight who has come in a pound under. One announced at "ten stone eight" has missed the limit by a pound, and the consequences of that, from a second attempt on the scales to a title that can be lost but not won, are set out in our guide to the weigh-in and what happens when a boxer misses weight.
Championship contests have to be made at the division limit. Ordinary contests do not. A six-rounder on a small-hall bill is agreed at whatever weight the two managers settle on, which may be a figure that appears nowhere above: 10st 9lb, say, two pounds over the welterweight limit, because one man took the fight at a week's notice. The table describes divisions. It does not describe every fight.
Why every limit is a ceiling and not a band
No professional rule says a welterweight must weigh more than ten stone. The regulation sets a maximum for each class and stops there. The floor is a matter of common sense and matchmaking: a boxer who can make ten stone will usually fight at super-lightweight, where the men are smaller, so in practice a welterweight weighs between 10st and 10st 7lb on the scales. But only the top figure is enforced.
This is why a heavyweight title has been contested by a man under the bridgerweight ceiling. When Oleksandr Usyk met Tyson Fury for the undisputed heavyweight championship in Riyadh in May 2024, his official weight was a shade below 224 lb, light enough for the WBC's own in-between division, and he was conceding more than two and a half stone. Nothing in the rules was strained. A heavyweight is anyone the scales do not exclude from heavyweight, and the scales exclude nobody.
The ceiling also explains why two champions at one weight can look a size apart on fight night. The scales record a boxer once, usually the day before the contest. What he weighs when the first bell goes is another matter.
The weigh-in measures a moment
Take two welterweights. One lives at around 10st 10lb between fights and trims a few pounds in camp. The other walks about closer to twelve stone, diets hard for eight weeks and sweats out the last of it in the final two days. Both stand on the scales at 10st 7lb. By the following evening the first man has barely changed and the second has put much of the water back. They are in the same division by rule and in different ones by physique.
Regulators have tried to narrow that gap without abolishing it. The IBF holds a second weigh-in on the morning of its title fights, at which neither boxer may be more than ten pounds above the division limit. Promoters write similar conditions into contracts, a device explained in our piece on how a rehydration clause works. Neither changes the basic design. The division limit is a gate a boxer passes through on one day, and the table above lists gates.
One weight, three names: super-welterweight, light-middleweight and junior middleweight
The eight original classes have one name each, used by everybody. The in-between classes do not, because they were invented at different times by different organisations and each body kept its own vocabulary. A British reader meets three versions of the eleven-stone division in a single weekend: super-welterweight on the Board's title list, junior middleweight in an American broadcast, light-middleweight in an old copy of a record book. All three mean a limit of 154 lb.
The pattern is regular once seen. The WBC and the WBA name an in-between class "super" after the division below it. The IBF and the WBO name it "junior" after the division above. British usage for a long time preferred "light" plus the division above, which gave light-welterweight and light-middleweight, and the Board has since moved its championship titles at those two weights to the "super" forms.
| Limit | WBC and WBA | IBF and WBO | British Boxing Board of Control |
|---|---|---|---|
| 108 lb | Light flyweight | Junior flyweight | No British title at this weight |
| 115 lb | Super flyweight | Junior bantamweight | Super-flyweight |
| 122 lb | Super bantamweight | Junior featherweight | Super-bantamweight |
| 130 lb | Super featherweight | Junior lightweight | Super-featherweight |
| 140 lb | Super lightweight | Junior welterweight | Super-lightweight, formerly light-welterweight |
| 154 lb | Super welterweight | Junior middleweight | Super-welterweight, formerly light-middleweight |
Two more oddities sit at the ends of the scale. The 105 lb class is strawweight to the WBC, minimumweight to the WBA and mini flyweight to the IBF and WBO. And the WBO has long listed its 200 lb class as junior heavyweight, though everyone who talks about it, including the champions, says cruiserweight.
None of this affects a single pound. It does affect searching a record. A boxer described as a former "IBF junior welterweight and WBC super lightweight champion" held two belts in one division, not titles at two weights, and a careless reading turns a unified champion into a two-weight one. The safe habit is to translate every name into its limit before counting anything.
Heavyweight has no upper limit, and what the 2003 change did beneath it
Heavyweight is defined by what it is not. It starts one ounce above the cruiserweight limit and goes on indefinitely, which makes it the only class whose boundaries have moved several times without anyone touching its own rule.
Until 1979 there was no cruiserweight division, so a heavyweight was anybody over 175 lb. Men of thirteen stone fought for the richest prize in sport because there was nowhere else for them to go. Rocky Marciano, champion from 1952 until he retired unbeaten, would make the present cruiserweight limit with pounds to spare. So would Floyd Patterson.
The WBC introduced cruiserweight at 190 lb. It moved its own limit to 195 lb in 1981 and back to 190 lb in 1988, the figure the WBA and IBF had used throughout, so for most of the next quarter of a century 13st 8lb was the top of the class. A boxer of 13st 10lb or 14st was therefore a heavyweight, and a small one, at a time when the men at the top of that division were getting steadily bigger. In 2003 the cruiserweight ceiling was raised to 200 lb, and all four major bodies have used that figure since. The British title limit moved to 14st 4lb to match.
What ten pounds did
The change took a band of boxers out of heavyweight altogether. A man who scaled 14st 2lb no longer had to choose between boiling down to 13st 8lb and giving away three stone to a full-sized heavyweight. He had a division. Cruiserweight, which had been treated as a waiting room, acquired some of the sport's better champions in the years that followed, several of them British: Johnny Nelson, whose long WBO reign straddled both limits, then David Haye, Tony Bellew and Lawrence Okolie.
It also raised the price of admission to heavyweight. Evander Holyfield had unified the cruiserweight titles at the old 190 lb limit before moving up in 1988. Haye did the same at 200 lb two decades later and then took the WBA heavyweight title from Nikolai Valuev in Nuremberg in November 2009, conceding roughly seven stone. Usyk, undisputed at cruiserweight in 2018, repeated the journey. Each of them was a cruiserweight champion who grew, and each met men far heavier than himself, because above 200 lb the rulebook stops making distinctions. The British end of that story is told in our list of British heavyweight world champions.
Whether an open-ended division is fair is a reasonable question, and the next section is the WBC's answer to it.
Bridgerweight and why most lists still stop at seventeen
In November 2020 the WBC announced a new division for boxers between 200 lb and 224 lb, which is sixteen stone. It called the class bridgerweight after Bridger Walker, a six-year-old American who had been badly bitten protecting his younger sister from a dog that summer. The first WBC bridgerweight title fight took place in October 2021, when Oscar Rivas outpointed Ryan Rozicki.
The reasoning was straightforward. With heavyweights routinely weighing eighteen and nineteen stone, a man of fifteen stone was being asked to do what no boxer in any other division is asked to do. A sixteen-stone ceiling would give him an honest class.
The rest of the sport was unconvinced. The IBF and the WBO declined to follow. The WBA did adopt the weight in December 2023, at first under the name super cruiserweight, and staged its first title fight that month. The winner was stripped after a failed drug test, a replacement champion was crowned in July 2024, and on 30 June 2026 the WBA abolished the division, moving its titleholders into the cruiserweight and heavyweight rankings. That leaves the WBC alone again. The Board of Control has not created a British title at the weight, and a British boxer who holds a bridgerweight belt, as Lawrence Okolie did after winning the WBC version in May 2024, holds a world title in a class his own national authority does not list.
- Before 1979No cruiserweight class exists. Heavyweight begins above the light-heavyweight limit of 175 lb, or 12st 7lb.
- 1979The WBC sanctions a cruiserweight title with a limit of 190 lb. Heavyweight now begins above 13st 8lb, though the WBC alone used 195 lb from 1981 to 1988.
- 2003The cruiserweight ceiling is raised to 200 lb, or 14st 4lb, and heavyweight begins there for every major body.
- 2020The WBC adds bridgerweight from 200 lb to 224 lb. For WBC purposes alone, there is a class between the two.
- 2026The WBA, which adopted bridgerweight in 2023, abolishes it. The IBF and WBO never recognised it.
The sequence of changes at the top of the scale. The first four dates are those of WBC decisions; other bodies followed the 2003 change and, with one temporary exception, did not follow the 2020 one.
It failed to catch on partly because the men it was meant for did not want it. A fifteen-stone boxer with ambition wants the heavyweight title and the purse attached to it, and the ceiling rule already lets him fight for it. Partly because an extra division means an extra belt, and the sport has heard that pitch before. A division needs champions the public has heard of, and the best small heavyweights of the period chose to stay heavyweights.
The weights the British Boxing Board of Control awards titles at
The Board contests British championships at fifteen weights, not seventeen. The list begins at flyweight and runs up to heavyweight, leaving out minimumweight and light-flyweight at the bottom and bridgerweight near the top.
- 17World divisions
- 15With a British title
- 2Without a British title
- 112Lightest British title, in pounds
Counts of divisions, not of champions. The world figure excludes bridgerweight, which only the WBC sanctions.
The omission at the bottom is practical. A championship needs a champion, a challenger and a queue of contenders behind them, and there have rarely been enough licensed British professionals under eight stone to supply all of that. The Lonsdale Belt makes the arithmetic harder, since a boxer keeps one outright only by winning a set number of championship contests at the same weight, three under the old rule and four, one of them a mandatory defence, since 1999, a rule covered in our guide to the Lonsdale Belt and how it is won outright. A division with four active boxers cannot sustain that.
It was not always so thin down there. Flyweight was once the weight Britain was best at. Jimmy Wilde of Tylorstown was the first man generally recognised as world flyweight champion, in 1916; Benny Lynch, Jackie Paterson, Rinty Monaghan, Terry Allen, Walter McGowan and Charlie Magri all held versions of the world title after him. The usual explanation for the decline is not a boxing one. A population that eats better grows bigger, and the pool of adult men who can make eight stone without starving shrinks.
Britain has still produced champions below the bottom of its own title list. The Scot Paul Weir won the WBO's 105 lb title in 1993 and its 108 lb title the following year, at weights where he could never have boxed for a Lonsdale Belt.
How the in-between weights joined the British list
The Board did not adopt the newer divisions in one go. British titles at light-welterweight and light-middleweight date from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Cruiserweight and super-middleweight followed in the 1980s, super-bantamweight in the 1990s and super-flyweight in the 2000s, each one arriving years after the world bodies had created the class, and at the lighter weights decades after. The caution was deliberate. A British title is supposed to mean the best boxer in the country at a weight, and the Board waited until there were enough of them to make the claim credible.
Women's professional boxing: the same limits with atomweight added
The Board licensed its first woman professional in 1998, after Jane Couch took it to an industrial tribunal and won. Women's world titles are contested at the same limits and under the same division names as the men's from minimumweight upwards, so a women's welterweight title is still made at 10st 7lb and a women's lightweight title at 9st 9lb.
Two things differ. Beneath minimumweight the sanctioning bodies add a class at 102 lb, which is 7st 4lb or about 46.3 kg. The WBC calls it atomweight; other bodies have their own labels for the same limit, in the usual way. No men's division exists at that weight.
At the other end the women's scale is compressed. Few women box above twelve stone, so the bodies that sanction a women's heavyweight title generally start it immediately above the light-heavyweight limit of 175 lb, with no cruiserweight class between. A women's heavyweight champion may therefore weigh less than a men's cruiserweight. Readers checking a specific title should look at the limit the sanctioning body printed for that contest, because this is the part of the women's list on which the bodies are least uniform.
Where the title fights are
Women's championship boxing is concentrated in the middle of the table, roughly from flyweight to super-welterweight. That is where the deepest fields are and where Britain's champions have mostly come from: Nicola Adams at flyweight, Chantelle Cameron, undisputed at super-lightweight in 2022, and Natasha Jonas, who collected three of the four belts at super-welterweight in the same year. Savannah Marshall, at middleweight and then as undisputed super-middleweight champion in 2023, was the exception who proved how short the queue is at the heavier weights.
Thin divisions have a side effect worth knowing about. Women move between weights more freely than men, and three- and four-weight champions are more common, because the next title up may be vacant or held by someone a boxer has already beaten. The history behind all this, including the years when the Board refused to license women at all, is in our account of women's boxing in the UK.
Why an amateur's weight in kilograms does not map onto a professional division
An amateur middleweight and a professional middleweight are not the same size. For most of the modern era the amateur middleweight limit was 75 kg, which is a little over 165 lb, five pounds above the professional figure of 160. An amateur heavyweight, at 91 kg and more recently 92 kg, has been almost exactly a professional cruiserweight. The amateur class that corresponds to professional heavyweight is super-heavyweight, the category in which Anthony Joshua won Olympic gold at London 2012.
The two codes share names because the amateur list grew from the same eight classes, then went metric and drifted. Amateur limits are set in whole or half kilograms by the international federation and adopted by England Boxing for domestic competition. They have been redrawn repeatedly, and now by more than one federation, since the International Olympic Committee withdrew recognition from the old governing body and a new federation, World Boxing, took its place for Olympic purposes. Anyone quoting an amateur limit should say which year's list it comes from.
There is a structural difference too. Amateurs weigh in on the day they box, and in a tournament they weigh in again on every day they box. There is no overnight to rehydrate in, so an amateur fights much nearer his scale weight than a professional does. A boxer who turns professional often drops a division by name while staying the same size.
The Olympic list has been cut and redrawn
The Olympic programme shows the redrawing most clearly, because each change was made to fit a quota. Men's boxing had twelve weight classes at Sydney 2000. It had eleven at the next two Games and ten at London 2012, where men's featherweight was dropped as the first three women's classes came in. By Paris 2024 the men were down to seven and the women up to six, and the International Olympic Committee has confirmed seven each for Los Angeles 2028.
Seven classes cannot cover the range that twelve did without wide gaps, and the gaps fall on real boxers. A man who is a natural fit for a category that has been removed must either cut hard to the one below or give away size in the one above, and some simply turn professional earlier than they otherwise would. British Olympic boxers compete for Great Britain, not England, and are chosen through the GB Boxing programme in Sheffield. At the Commonwealth Games the same boxers represent England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland separately.
How a boxer chooses a division
Every boxer has two weights. The one he lives at between fights, known in gyms as walking-around weight, and the one he can reach on the scales at the end of a training camp. The division he chooses is a bet on how far apart those two can safely be.
The temptation is always to go lower. A boxer who can squeeze into the class beneath his natural one will be taller and longer than most of his opponents and, once rehydrated, heavier. The cost is paid in training, where energy goes on losing weight instead of on boxing, and sometimes in the ring, where a drained fighter fades after six rounds or takes a punch worse than he should. Trainers tend to describe the right division as the lowest one a boxer can make without the weight becoming the main event of the camp.
The gaps are not even
At the bottom of the scale the divisions are three and four pounds apart. At the top there is a single step of twenty-five.
The spacing is less uneven than it looks, because what matters is proportion. Three pounds on a 105 lb boxer is close to three per cent of him. Seven pounds on a 140 lb boxer is five per cent. The jump from 175 lb to 200 lb is over fourteen per cent, the one place on the scale where the step is out of all proportion, and it is no accident that it is also the place where a boxer moving up most often stalls.
It follows that winning titles in several divisions means different things at different points on the scale. A boxer can pass from minimumweight to bantamweight, five classes, while gaining thirteen pounds. One step from light-heavyweight to cruiserweight is nearly twice that.
Two-weight and three-weight champions
A two-weight world champion has held a world title in two divisions; a three-weight champion in three. The phrase says nothing about holding them at once, and almost nobody does, since a boxer can only weigh in for one division at a time and the bodies expect a champion to defend or vacate.
The first man to do it three times was born in Cornwall. Bob Fitzsimmons, from Helston, won the world middleweight title in 1891, the heavyweight title in 1897 and the light-heavyweight title in 1903. Henry Armstrong held three of the eight available championships simultaneously in 1938, at featherweight, lightweight and welterweight, which under the modern list would have meant spanning five classes. Manny Pacquiao won titles in eight. Among British boxers, Duke McKenzie was the first of the modern era to win world titles at three weights, from flyweight to super-bantamweight between 1988 and 1992, and Ricky Burns later did it from super-featherweight to super-lightweight.
A fight made between divisions, at an agreed figure that belongs to neither, is a different thing again, and usually has no title attached. That is a catchweight contest.
The case for and against so many boxing weight divisions
Weight decides fights. A good big man beats a good small man so reliably that the sport has organised itself around preventing the match, and every division on the table exists because somebody, at some point, was being asked to give away too much.
The case for narrow classes rests on that. At 108 lb a four-pound disadvantage is a serious one, and without a light-flyweight division the smallest professionals would spend their careers outweighed. The in-between classes also keep boxers from the worst weight cuts, since a man caught between welterweight and middleweight has an eleven-stone division instead of a choice between starving and being bullied. On safety grounds alone it is hard to argue for fewer rungs at the lighter end.
The case against is arithmetic. Seventeen divisions and four major sanctioning bodies make sixty-eight world titles before a single interim, regular, silver or franchise belt is counted. In 1909 there were eight classes and, in Britain, one champion in each. A casual follower then could name every one of them. Nobody can now, including most people paid to write about it.
There is a subtler cost as well. With classes three and four pounds apart, a talented boxer can collect titles in several divisions without ever gaining much weight or meeting the best man in any of them, and "four-weight world champion" has become a phrase that needs checking before it impresses anyone. The old champions were fewer and had fewer places to hide. When Henry Armstrong held three titles in 1938 he had beaten the reigning champion at each weight, with twenty-one pounds between the lowest limit and the highest.
The honest position is that both things are true. The extra divisions are good for the boxers in them and bad for the meaning of the word champion, and it is the four bodies, not the seventeen weights, that do most of the damage. Seventeen divisions with one champion each would be a perfectly legible sport. Britain has an approximation of it in the Board's own list, where there is one British champion per weight and nobody is in doubt who he is.
The eight original classes and the National Sporting Club's stone limits of 1909
Before 1909 a weight class was whatever two camps agreed it was. A man might claim the "nine-stone championship" or the "ten-stone-four championship", and the limit for a given title moved from fight to fight according to who was the bigger draw and could dictate terms. Names such as bantam and feather were in use on both sides of the Atlantic, but the figures attached to them were not fixed and American and British practice differed by several pounds.
The National Sporting Club, founded in 1891 and for two decades the nearest thing British boxing had to a governing body, ended the argument at home. In 1909 its committee set out eight classes with definite limits in stones and pounds, and attached a championship belt to each, the trophy that became the Lonsdale Belt after the club's president. The first was contested that November at lightweight.
| Class | 1909 limit in stone | In pounds | Today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flyweight | 8st | 112 lb | Unchanged |
| Bantamweight | 8st 6lb | 118 lb | Unchanged |
| Featherweight | 9st | 126 lb | Unchanged |
| Lightweight | 9st 9lb | 135 lb | Unchanged |
| Welterweight | 10st 7lb | 147 lb | Unchanged |
| Middleweight | 11st 6lb | 160 lb | Unchanged |
| Light-heavyweight | 12st 7lb | 175 lb | Unchanged |
| Heavyweight | Over 12st 7lb | Over 175 lb | Now over 14st 4lb |
Seven of those eight limits have survived more than a century without alteration, through the creation of the Board of Control in 1929, the arrival of four world bodies and the metrication of nearly everything else. American commissions adopted the same figures in pounds in the years after the First World War, and it is that step which turned a London club's house rules into the world scale. Only heavyweight has moved, and only because other classes were inserted beneath it.
The stone-based origin leaves fingerprints. It is why lightweight is 135 lb and not 130 or 140: nine stone nine was the figure the club settled on, and the first belt was fought for at it. It is why every later division had to be fitted into gaps that were never designed to hold one, which accounts for the uneven spacing in the chart above. The men who drew the list were fixing eight classes. They were not leaving room for nine more.
How the in-between divisions arrived, lapsed and came back
Light-heavyweight was the first intruder and the only one the National Sporting Club accepted. It was an American idea, promoted by a Chicago newspaperman in 1903 for men too big for middleweight and too small for the heavyweights of the day, and it had been going for six years when the club wrote it into the 1909 list.
Everything else came later and from across the Atlantic or from the world bodies. The dates below are those at which a champion was first recognised at the weight, and for the two oldest they mark a first life, not a continuous one. Cruiserweight is dated from the first WBC title fight in December 1979, which was drawn; the belt was not won until the rematch the following March.
| Division | Limit | First recognised | By |
|---|---|---|---|
| Super-featherweight | 130 lb | 1921 | American commissions, as junior lightweight |
| Super-lightweight | 140 lb | 1922 | A poll of readers of an American boxing weekly, as junior welterweight |
| Super-welterweight | 154 lb | 1962 | World Boxing Association |
| Light-flyweight | 108 lb | 1975 | World Boxing Council |
| Super-bantamweight | 122 lb | 1976 | World Boxing Council |
| Cruiserweight | 190 lb, later 200 lb | 1979 | World Boxing Council |
| Super-flyweight | 115 lb | 1980 | World Boxing Council |
| Super-middleweight | 168 lb | 1984 | International Boxing Federation |
| Minimumweight | 105 lb | 1987 | International Boxing Federation |
The two junior classes of the 1920s had a rough time of it. They were regarded as promoters' inventions, a way of putting "championship" on a poster, and during the 1930s recognition was withdrawn and the titles fell into disuse. The 140 lb champion of 1922, Pinky Mitchell, had been chosen by a magazine ballot before any commission took the class up, which did not help its standing. After brief attempts in the 1940s both were revived for good in 1959 and have been continuous since. The 140 lb division in particular went from a gimmick to one of the strongest weights in the sport, the one at which Ricky Hatton made his name long after it had been written off.
The burst between 1975 and 1987 has a different explanation. By then there were rival world bodies competing for sanctioning fees and for a foothold in East Asia and Latin America, where a large share of the world's best small boxers were, and where the gaps between flyweight, bantamweight and featherweight were costing real fighters real careers. Four of the five classes below lightweight that are not among the original eight were created in those twelve years. Cynicism about the motive is fair. The divisions have nonetheless lasted, which the short-lived experiments have not.
Super-middleweight is the one Britain took to most readily. The IBF crowned its first champion at twelve stone in 1984, a Scottish-born boxer, Murray Sutherland, as it happens, and within a few years the weight belonged to Nigel Benn, Chris Eubank, Steve Collins and then Joe Calzaghe. A class that did not exist when most of them first laced a glove supplied British boxing's biggest nights for a decade.
The scale may not be finished. Bridgerweight shows that a body can still add a class on its own authority, and the WBA's retreat from it shows that adding one is easier than making it stick. For the rest of the rules that govern a fight once the weights are agreed, start at our combat sports section or browse the full England guides hub.