Felix Sturm fortune

Short introduction

The boxer known as Felix Sturm is actually Adnan Catic’s real name. As a boxer he played his fights for Germany, but he also has a Bosnian migration background. His weight class is the super middleweight, he is left-wing and has been world champion five times in various associations.

The Leverkusener is 1.81 m tall, has fought a total of 49 fights and recorded 40 victories. He has recently appeared in negative media headlines, including suspected doping and allegedly unpaid tax debts.

Early life

His parents come from the city of Blagaj in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is why Felix has dual citizenship. As a child, he grew up around Cologne, where he also attended municipal elementary school. He came into contact with boxing at a very early age, which enabled him to do his first amateur fights in his youth. During his amateur time, Felix had 134 victories compared to only 9 defeats. Already in the years 1995-1996 he was able to prove his talent as a German junior champion on a national level. Just two years later, he became German light middleweight champion twice in a row. During this time he continued to fight as a middleweight boxer, won a gold medal at the European Championships, among others, and also took part in tournaments outside Germany.

The world championship in Houston followed in 1999, but this was the end of the second lap for him because he met the later Olympic champion in 2000 and lost to Ibraimow on points. Soon after, in 2000, he moved to the professional camp and aspired to a career as a professional.

Career

In January 2001 he made his professional debut in Munich and had his first professional fight against the Portuguese Antonio Ribeiro. He won this fight on points and his winning streak continued for another 14 fights. From 2001 he was able to win many fights for himself, followed by some titles such as the WBO Intercontinental Championship. From now on Felix also had to defend various titles, which he also managed against boxers like the Spaniard Ruben Varon.

His title defense fights continued and he also had to compete against eight-time world champion Oscar de la Hoya from the lower weight class.

Career highlights

From now on, things went quickly and one highlight after another followed in his career. On June 5, 2004 it was time for Felix to be the absolute highlight in his career so far. In the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, the fight of the two took place in front of millions of spectators. For de la Hoya, it was, in a sense, only a springboard, because de la Hoya was actually aiming for a lucrative title reunification battle against the then reigning world champion and superstar Bernard Hopkins. This held the world championship title of three associations (IBF, WBA and WBC), which de la Hoya wanted to get. But to get this started, de la Hoya needed a victory over Felix Sturm, who at the time was considered a great outsider in the fight.

However, the fight was anything but easy for de la Hoya, because Sturm had several hits in the early rounds. In the subsequent rounds, Sturm was able to vary his style even more and was already confident of victory at the end of the fight in the last rounds.

Despite this superiority, Sturm lost his WBO title to de la Hoya on points. The level of awareness rose immensely after this fight in the storm.

In the further course of his career, he won the WBA world title and even became a WBA super champion in 2010. Felix also became IBF World Champion and had many fights until 2016. Later that year in October, however, he resigned his WBA super middleweight title and officially declared this as an injury to the elbow.

Amazing facts

He deliberately chose his name Felix Sturm to become known to a wider audience in Germany. In 2007 he coached Stefan Raab for his rematch against Regina Halmich.

He has been married to his long-time girlfriend since 2007, they have two children together, and Felix has been living with his family in Bosnia since August 2016.

This step probably also had to do with his legal disputes in Germany.

Because since 2016 Felix Sturm has repeatedly appeared in the media through negative headlines.

First there was suspicion of doping abuse and in April 2019 he was arrested at a fitness fair in Cologne for suspected tax evasion. Initially, he was offered a deposit of one million euros, but the court revised this because of the considerable risk of flight. Therefore, he was fined several times and sentenced to several months in prison.