'Farewell my love!' Widow of tragic Maxim Dadashev leads mourning at Russian boxer's funeral
The bereft wife of Maxim Dadashev, the boxer who died of injuries suffered in a recent fight, led hundreds of mourners in grieving as he was laid to rest in his hometown of St. Petersburg, Russia, on Sunday.
Twenty-eight-year-old Dadashev died on July 23 after suffering a bleed on the brain as a result of an 11th-round TKO loss four days earlier to Puerto Rican figher Subriel Matias in Oxon Hill, Maryland, USA.
After repatriation issues were resolved, his body was flown back to Russia for a funeral at the Peterhof cemetery of the Nikolayevskaya hospital in his St Petersburg hometown on Sunday. The service was attended by hundreds of mourners and Dadashev's young widow Elizaveta, with whom the athlete shared a young son, led tributes to her "warrior" husband.
"Farewell, my love! I hope that one day we will meet and be together again," she wrote in a heartfelt Instagram post captioning a shot of her solemnly gazing into his open casket in a final goodbye.
Dadashev's former amateur coach Ruslan Dadayev said: "Since his childhood, he had had a passionate and unstoppable desire to go beyond himself and be triumphant during a fight. Neither pain nor health held him back from fighting.
"None of us could even think of such a tragic end...We believed that he would achieve his goal and become a champion, because he had great potential," he added, TASS reported.
Dadashev, of Dagestani origin in Russia's Northern Caucasus region and who moved to the US to begin his professional career, was buried in the Muslim section of the cemetery after an Islamic ritual was performed involving bathing, followed by Salat al-Janazah prayer.
A crowdfunding page has been set up by Dadashev's former promotional team Top Rank to provide financial assistance to his wife, with a target of $500,000.
It was earlier reported that a lawsuit would be submitted on Elizaveta's behalf, by the Russian Boxing Federation against the organizers of the fight. The lawsuit is based on two factors outlining separate possible rule violations regarding authenticity checks on medical documents, and the boxer's prior health problems.
Dadashev lost conciousness upon leaving the ring after trainer Buddy McGirt threw in the towel between the 11th and 12th rounds in the IBF super lightweight title eliminator between the two undefeated 13-0 fighters, on July 19.
He was transported to the local UM Prince George's Hospital Center and later placed into a medically-induced coma, undergoing a two-hour surgical procedure to relieve swelling in his skull. He later showed "severe signs of brain damage"and died the following Tuesday, having suffered a subdural hematoma.
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