Eighty-two days after the fight in the White House grounds, Ilia Topuria announced he is coming back. Not with a promo clip, but with a video message addressed to his son Hugo - which is a far smarter move than it looks at first glance.

A reminder of what happened on 14 June. The fight was part of the celebration of Donald Trump's eightieth birthday, his opponent was Justin Gaethje, and Topuria came out of it with two fractures of the eye socket and severe damage to his right eye. By his own account, he lost the sight in his right eye in the first round and in his left in the second. His brother Aleksandre stopped the fight after the fourth round. Then several days in a hospital in Washington.

It is the first defeat of his professional career. And not a defeat at just any bout, but at an event organised around an American president's birthday - which leaves everyone involved with rather more explaining to do than they would like.

Who he is talking to

"The only victory nobody can steal from you is your character," he tells his son. And: "What you lose does not matter. What matters is how you lose and who you choose to be when the dark comes down." And then: "After being in that hell, I realised I am stronger than before."

Addressing a child is an old, tested and very effective format. You do not have to explain anything to journalists, nobody can contest your sentence, and everybody reads it anyway. That does not mean the emotion is fake - it means the man writing it knows where the text is going.

What went unanswered is the medical part. Two orbital fractures and temporary loss of sight in both eyes are not an injury you come back from because you are strong. It is an injury you come back from because a doctor signed off that you may. About that signature, nobody has said anything so far.

The Balkans know these stories. An athlete who, with a signature or without one, goes back into the ring, the hall, the pitch - because the time off costs more than the risk. Would anybody here even ask the question about the eye, or would we go straight to when the next fight is?