Carnival is over for Lewis

As he stepped out into a bright African dawn yesterday, no longer the champion of the world, Lennox Lewis was telling himself over and over again that he had been the victim of a lucky punch. A lucky punch from a brave opponent, to be sure, but still the kind of freakish misfortune that can happen to the best of heavyweights.

No one in his camp seemed willing to contradict him. Not his manager, Frank Maloney, who claimed that the fighter had been "mugged". Not his trainer, Emanuel Steward, who thought that the referee had been wrong to count no further than six before giving the bout, along with the World Boxing Council and International Boxing Federation titles, to Hasim Rahman. The immediate response was that Lewis had not deserved to lose, and would therefore be exercising his right to an immediate rematch.

Maloney's lawyers will be sitting down to sort that one out this morning, mindful that Rahman's manager, Stan Hoffman, has indicated a preference for staging a voluntary defence against another challenger before honouring the obligation to meet Lewis again. Were the new champion to lose to a third party, Lewis would have no further contractual claim.

Once again Lewis's inability to produce a consistently dangerous level of aggression was exposed.

While the punch that ended the fight was by no means the whole story, as he seemed to think, it may nevertheless have been as remarkable as any terminal blow in the history of the heavyweight crown. There was certainly more to it than mere opportunism.

With two minutes of the fifth round gone, Rahman spun out of a messy clinch and started to throw a right hook before changing his mind and pulling the punch. Lewis stood back and laughed at him, not for the first time. A few seconds later Lewis was bouncing off the ropes near his corner when Rahman came at him, driving up from a crouch, as he had regularly done since the start of the fight, to launch a long right hand from a perfectly balanced stance. The punch whistled between Lewis's half-raised gloves and caught him on the side of the jaw, the impact increased by the recipient's own forward momentum.

Lewis went straight down, measuring his full 6ft 5in on the canvas and banging the back of his head as he fell, further disordering his senses. Steward believes that a world heavyweight title holder should be allowed the dignity of a full count, but few others in the Big Top Arena would criticise the decision of the Belgian referee, Daniel Van De Wiele, not to stand upon the order of the champion's going.

"It was not an accident," Stan Hoffman insisted, attempting to explain the way his man had ended the contest. "It was a plan." And a pretty simple one at that. Seven years younger, two and a half inches shorter and just over a stone lighter, Rahman aimed to bother Lewis by burrowing up inside his guard before making space for one big punch.

His strategy could be glimpsed in the inconclusive first round, although Lewis narrowly took the second without doing very much. The fighters' heads had already begun to clash, the champion receiving the first of several mild admonishments from the referee while Rahman began to suffer bleeding from the abrasion over his left eye. Nevertheless the challenger may have done enough to shade the third round.

At the start of the fourth Lewis attacked again, was repulsed by a brilliant counterattack, and once more quickly ran out of steam. "I felt fine," he said afterwards, trying to forestall the obvious question about the effects of his decision to spend no more than the final 12 days of his preparation at altitude. "Nobody saw me breathing heavy in there." In fact many had, particularly while Rahman was taking the fourth comfortably as the chants of "Hasim! Hasim! Hasim!" arose from the 5,000-strong crowd.

At the start of the fifth round the Muslim from Baltimore, half-blinded by blood, held off one last assault from Lewis. "I couldn't see some of his punches," he said, "but I had a general idea of which area he was in and I just kept punching." He absorbed Lewis's best blow of the fight - a right hook to the head - before jabbing his opponent across the ring to set up the coup de grace.

As the referee gave the decision that indicated the transferral of Lewis's titles, Rahman and his corner went understandably berserk. Their joy was profound but, like Lewis's on his own day of destiny two years ago, when he prised the titles from Evander Holyfield's grasp, it contained nothing of the arrogance or rancour which boxing's followers have come to expect from the big men. For once, prize-fighters had transcended their tawdry surroundings - although that thought will be of little comfort to British boxing, whose two leading figures have been deprived of their lustre inside as many weeks.