Omer Landau
Omer LandauOmer Landau

Four pro matches. Four victories by knockout. All in the first round. That is the record of Omer Landau, Israel's premier pro boxer.

Such a string of (literally) stunning victories did not happen by chance. From a very young age he spent most of his free time training in boxing with his uncle.

As far back as he can remember, becoming a pro boxing champion was Omer’s dream. Later, he moved to the US, where boxing is a more popular sport than in Israel, in order to train and pursue his dream. There, in Los Angeles, he trained at Floyds Mayweather’s Wild Card Boxing Club, one of the most famous boxing clubs in the world.

As his career developed, Omer went on to train with the "money team", participating in closed training sessions with various members of the Mayweather Family, including Uncle Rogers, Floyd Mayweather Jr and Floyd Mayweather Sr.

Next, he joined the Mendez Boxing Gym in New York, and the Wild Card Boxing Club of Freddie Roach in Los Angeles. All this hard work and single-minded dedication has definitely paid out.

Today, Omer is widely recognized as Israel's face in the world of pro boxing in the US, and has established a significant social media presence, with over 400,000 Instagram followers.

And now he's back for 2020.

First, Omer is looking forward to facing a rematch with an Israeli boxer that he had already defeated in 2019 in Tel Aviv. But Omer has bigger dreams to pursue – like every professional boxer he aspires to represent his country in the Olympic Games. In fact, that is the dream which kept him going through his single-minded pursuit of a professional boxing career.

However, pursuing the dream of competing in the Olympics requires him to put on hold his professional boxing career, at least for a time for the requirements from an Olympic contestant and a pro boxer are quite different.

For one thing, the rules, and accordingly the boxing strategy and training methods and focus of pro – and Olympic- boxing are quite different. Unlike the 4-12 rounds of professional boxing (assuming Omer does not KO his opponent in the first round as he has done so far), Olympic matches end after only 3 rounds. The glove size in Olympic matches are also much smaller, and headgear is absolutely mandatory.