He juggles and can walk on his hands across a ring. The grind of a normal training camp is a mainstay but it is his unorthodox all-round training which sets him apart.
One particular party piece is to hold his breath under water to demonstrate his incredible oxygen-carrying capability. What is his record? ‘Now it is is four minutes and 30 seconds.’ The average person can manage around a minute.
The intensity and variety of training has its setbacks. ‘He goes through a lot of shoes, they just catch on fire,’ conditioning coach Cecilio Flores once said.
Anatoly is described by his team as ‘peaceful, patient and wisdom personified’, but rarely gives interviews.
‘He is my trainer but he has always stayed like a father to me,’ says Lomachenko. ‘Every day for me he’s a father, in training, at home, father.
Are you still trying to impress him? ‘Yes. Of course.’ Belts come and go but the pursuit of a father’s approval endures regardless.
In one rare interview he defined his philosophy in a few simple words. ‘Any sport at a high level comes down to intellect,’ he once said. ‘If you truly want to go higher it becomes a battle of intellect.’
Anatoly has handed his son an arsenal of weapons to work with in the ring. He moves, slips and sways, pulls opponent’s guard down with one hand and strikes with the other, and of course he dances.
But to make Vasiliy the ultimate fighter – to win that battle of intellect – Anatoly had another trick up his sleeve.
In London, he watches on silently in the background, unannounced and alone as his son sags under the weight of public demand. He watches studiously and pulls a baseball cap low down onto his face. Inside his mind are the blueprints for his son’s global domination. But he won’t be talking today.
In November, California slumped to its knees as 240,000 acres of wildfires ripped across its parched land; they were the most destructive in the state’s history. From both the north and south they raged with whole towns in their path. 85 people have lost their lives.
In the south, Lomachenko and his team were not immune to the panic and fear felt by thousands fleeing the scene. Oxnard is a peaceful and wealthy seaside town outside Los Angeles and has become eastern European boxing’s home away from home. He trains at the Boxing Laboratory alongside the likes of Tony Bellew’s conqueror Oleksandr Usyk, just miles away from where the southern fires started.
‘It was very close to us,’ says Lomachenko’s team psychologist Andriy Kolosov. ‘If the wind was blowing in our direction then our house would have been on fire. Luckily the wind was blowing towards the ocean. We stayed here but we were ready to leave if we needed to.’
Kolosov was there as an observer while Lomachenko mulled over the ashes of his only amateur defeat, at the 2007 World Championships in Chicago against Russia’s Albert Selimov and was soon brought on board.
Mental training is his speciality. It is his job to frame Anatoly’s masterpiece and hone Lomachenko’s boxing brain in tandem with his body.
He tests the fighter with a series of mental exercises at the end of long training days in order to train focus and execution even when he's tired. Delicately balancing wooden blocks end on end with hands still shaking from a heavy bag session isn’t commonplace in the world of boxing, but it works for Lomacheko.
He says: ‘My role is to increase the relationship between his mind and his body.
‘If you have enough mental capacity to focus for 12 rounds then you can make successful decisions during a fight.
‘If we increase resources of mental activity [by training while fatigued], he has as much skill as possible to control what he’s doing.’
Lomachenko agrees: ‘I think my feet are most important for me, but having the ability to be very quick to change something during a fight by thinking about it is also important.’
The goal is to reach a point where mind and body align to create something boxing has rarely seen; Lomachenko’s team describe what he does as ‘movement intelligence’ – the knowledge of not only how to hit, but how to use his intelligence to figure out how to avoid a return blow and be positioned to strike again. In milliseconds …
So what happens when there is a glitch in the Matrix, like when Lomachenko was floored on his way to a knockout win over Jorge Linares to win the WBA lightweight title in his last fight?
‘He didn’t lose orientation or concentration, he made a mistake in his movement. Something occurred not according to our plan,’ Kolosov insists defiantly. There are no unexplained accidents in Lomachenko’s world.
In November, after a long, hard day in the gym, Kolosov took his charge to one side and placed him in front of a series of numbered charts pinned to the wall, like he always does.
The aim of the exercise is to use the numbered charts to solve a series of mental arithmetic problems as quickly as possible under time pressure and while he is exhausted. It is one of a handful of exercises the pair do together.
‘We do it close to the next fight at the peak of his preparations when Vasiliy gets very tired. We did the exercise the other day and he broke his record. He was faster than ever.’
So preparations for the Pedraza fight are going well, then? Kolosov laughs. ‘I hope so.’
His stylish win over a granite-hard Linares, during which he ripped his shoulder muscle so badly it required surgery, garnered the most attention but his four fights prior to that were the most eye-catching of all.
These four men weren’t beaten, they were broken. Marks didn’t appear on their faces from whipped leather ripped on jaws but they couldn’t go on; there was no point. They all quit.
Four fights, 27 rounds, two undefeated records snatched and the foundations of a legacy built. In honour of Roberto Duran’s infamous plea, he was no longer deemed ‘Hi-Tec’ Lomachenko because of his advanced style. He was named ‘No Mas-Chenko’. No more.
The crown jewel in that run was his win over the great Guillermo Rigondeaux last December.
No surprise, it was a historic occasion; the first professional bout where two multiple Olympic champions with undefeated records squared off. Such was the stature of the fight, Roy Jones junior even claimed that ‘on paper this is the best professional fight ever made.’
What happened next was a systematic dismantling of the Cuban in Lomachenko’s 10th professional fight. The 30-year-old toyed with his rival. Rigondeaux, angered and without an answer, tried to hold his rival’s head and punch, but he still couldn’t land.
By the start of the seventh round the undefeated, top 10 pound-for-pound fighter had decided enough was enough.
‘It was not a big win,’ Lomachenko shrugged afterwards.
Almost exactly a year to the day of Rigondeaux’s startling submission, on the very same weekend and in the same building, Pedraza becomes the next man to run the gauntlet.
‘We plan how to solve problems in our training,’ Lomachenko says without blinking.
A confluence of all factors – talent, environment, character and training have bought Lomachenko to this point; history is behind and well as laid out before him. It is a terrifying but real possibility that he will get even better, too. He has, after all, only fought 103 professional rounds of boxing.