Inside the gold and diamond boxing chain I designed for Rico Verhoeven ahead of his WBC heavyweight title fight against Oleksandr Usyk at the Pyramids of Giza, Egypt.
This Saturday, May 23rd, 2026, Rico Verhoeven walks into a boxing ring at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza to challenge Oleksandr Usyk for the WBC World Heavyweight Title — Glory in Giza, the first major boxing card ever staged at the Pyramids of Egypt, the first WBC heavyweight title fight ever held on Egyptian soil, and the most visually historic night the sport has seen in a generation.
I made a chain for it.
This week I flew to Cairo carrying it myself — gold, diamonds, and at the heart of it, a sculpture I have spent years bringing into the world: Valley of the Kings. A bust of an Egyptian pharaoh fused with the helmet of an astronaut. A boxing chain made for a fight that is itself a collision of past and future, ancient Egypt and modern combat sport.
A pilgrimage to Cairo with the chain
I have always believed that a great fight deserves a great icon. The WBC has unveiled its "King of the Nile" ceremonial belt for this historic Egyptian night. Matchroom Boxing and DAZN have packaged the whole spectacle as Glory in Giza. But trophies and titles are not the only objects that carry meaning into a ring like this. An object made by hand — with intent, with the weight of two civilizations behind it — becomes part of the story too.
I wanted Rico Verhoeven to carry that story with him into Egypt. Not metaphorically. Literally. Around his neck.
When I placed the chain over his head in Cairo, I felt the strange pleasure of watching one of my sculptures leave the studio and step into history. Rico is a warrior, and warriors have worn talismans since the first armies marched across this same desert. The fact that he will walk to the ring with the Pyramids of Giza behind him — the largest piece of art and architecture humanity has ever produced — feels almost too perfect to be coincidence.
The Rico vs Usyk chain: gold, diamonds, and the face of a pharaoh
The chain I brought to Egypt is built around the pendant — a miniature of Valley of the Kings, my marble sculpture from the Cultural Similarities series.
At first glance, you see the mask of Tutankhamun. The most recognizable face from Egyptian antiquity. The symbol of the oldest civilization we still know by name. Look longer, and you realize the bust has been fused with the helmet of a modern space suit.
This is, for me, the central question of the work: how different are we, really, from the people who built these pyramids forty-six centuries ago?
To honor the source, I worked closely with a professor of Egyptology so that every hieroglyph in the sculpture is accurate — drawn from the Book of the Dead, the ancient Egyptian collection of spells written across a thousand years to guide a soul through the afterlife. The full marble sculpture contains 2,474 separate elements. Translating that level of detail into a wearable boxing chain — in gold, set with diamonds — has been one of the most intricate projects my studio has ever taken on.
Ancient astronauts, ancient kings
The astronaut-pharaoh is not a stylistic choice. It is a deliberate nod to one of the oldest unanswered questions about Egypt: how did they build this?
The "ancient astronauts" idea — that the precision, the mathematics, the celestial alignment of the pyramids hint at influences beyond their own time — has fascinated me for as long as I have been making art. I am not making a claim. I am making an offering: a piece that holds the question open.
A pharaoh wearing an astronaut helmet is the past wearing the face of the future. Or the future remembering where it came from. Depending on which way you choose to look at it.
That is the kind of tension my work has always lived inside — utopia and dystopia, antiquity and technology, the ancient and the imagined-to-come. Valley of the Kings is the purest expression of it I have ever produced, and now it is hanging from a gold chain on the neck of the heavyweight challenger walking out at the Pyramids of Giza.
Why this chain, why this fight, why Egypt
Usyk versus Verhoeven is more than a boxing match. It is the first time the WBC Heavyweight crown has ever been contested in Egypt. It is the first major boxing card ever staged at the Pyramids of Giza. Two heavyweights, two disciplines, on the soil that buried kings.
When the ring lights come up on Saturday night and Rico walks out toward Oleksandr Usyk with the Great Pyramid lit behind him, the gold and diamond chain around his neck will carry the same iconography that the pharaohs once took into their tombs — and the same iconography that we, in the 21st century, send into orbit.
A pharaoh. An astronaut. The same face.
That is the chain I made. That is why I flew to Cairo to give it to Rico Verhoeven myself. And that is what I will be watching for, when the camera holds on the man in the corner before the bell rings at the Pyramids of Giza.
See you in Giza.
— Joseph Klibansky