Vitali Klitschko

(Віталій Кличко)

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By European People's Party EPP Congress 2025 | Valencia | Day 1 CC BY 2.0

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Born
1971 (55 years old)
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Belovodskoye, Ukraine

Position
Boxer

Status
Retired

Ethnicity
White

Team Number

Height
2.01 m (6 ft 7 in)

Weight
114kg

Outfitter

Kit

Wage Year

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Sport

Fighting

Team
_Retired Boxing

League
_Defunct Fighting Teams

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Description

Vitalii Volodymyrovych Klychko (Ukrainian: Віталій Володимирович Кличкоborn 19 July 1971), known as Vitali Klitschko, is a Ukrainian politician and former professional boxer who has served as the mayor of Kyiv since 2014. He previously served as the head of the Kyiv City State Administration until the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

As a professional boxer, Klitschko won multiple world heavyweight championships. He held the World Boxing Organization (WBO) title from 1999 to 2000, the Ring magazine title from 2004 to 2005, and the World Boxing Council (WBC) title twice between 2004 and 2013. Overall, he defeated 15 opponents in world heavyweight title fights, and made 12 successful title defences. In 2011, Vitali and his younger brother Wladimir Klitschko entered the Guinness World Records as brothers with most world heavyweight title fight wins (30 at the time; 40 as of 2020). From 2006 until 2015, Vitali and Wladimir (also a multiple world champion) dominated heavyweight boxing, a period widely known as the "Klitschko Era" of the division. Klitschko's last fight was in 2012, but he remained the WBC heavyweight champion at age 42 when he announced his retirement in December 2013. Though both of his losses were by stoppage—specifically by corner retirement—Klitschko is only the third heavyweight champion to have finished his boxing career without being knocked down, after Nikolai Valuev and Oliver McCall, and he is thus known for having one of the toughest chins in boxing history.

Klitschko formally began his political career in 2006 when he placed second in the Kyiv mayoral race. In 2010, he founded the party Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR) and was elected for this party the 2012 Ukrainian parliamentary election. He was a leading figure in the 2013–2014 Euromaidan protests, and he announced his possible candidacy for the Ukrainian presidency, but later withdrew and endorsed the eventual winner Petro Poroshenko. He was elected Mayor of Kyiv on 25 May 2014. He headed the election list of the winner of the 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election, the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, but gave up his parliamentary seat to stay on as mayor of Kyiv. On 28 August 2015, the UDAR party merged into Petro Poroshenko Bloc, and Klitschko became the new party leader. Klitschko was reelected as mayor on 15 November 2015. Klitschko revived UDAR, and left Petro Poroshenko Bloc with it, in May 2019 and simultaneously announced that UDAR would take part in the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election autonomously. UDAR failed to win any seats.

Klitschko was re-elected to a second term as mayor in the 2020 Kyiv local elections, securing 50.52% of the votes in the first round of voting and thus avoiding a run-off. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Klitschko has become an international symbol of Ukrainian resistance.