WALES’ greatest ever sportsman Joe Calzaghe has announced his retirement from the sport.

Calzaghe, 36, was the undefeated world super middleweight champion and the longest reigning world title holder in boxing history.

The Newbridge fighter has called time on a professional boxing career spanning almost two decades which saw him unbeaten in 18 years as a professional and amateur boxer.

Calzaghe’s record of having won all his 46 professional fights means that he retires as Britain’s only ever undefeated world champion in boxing (having held a world title for just two weeks short of eleven years) or indeed any in other major sport.

He first took the WBO super middleweight beating Chris Eubank on a unanimous points decision in October 1997 and went on to win 23 consecutive world title fights culminating in his points defeat last autumn of Roy Jones Jnr in front of a packed Madison Square Gardens in New York.

Jones was the second US legend defeated in his own backyard by the lightning fists of Calzaghe – a feat never achieved by any other UK boxer in the modern era and one which sees him retire as a two weight world champion, holding both super middleweight and the light heavyweight championships.

He had previously spectacularly outpointed Bernard Hopkins in Las Vegas in April 2008.

In 2007 he won the coveted BBC Sports Personality of the Year award. He was awarded the CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List the following June and MBE in 2008.

Born in Hammersmith in 1972 the son of a Welsh mother, Jackie and Sardinian father, Calzaghe grew up in Wales and began boxing at the age of nine. He won four schoolboy ABA titles followed by three consecutive senior British ABA titles between 1991 and 1993 when he turned professional. His senior ABA titles made Joe the only boxer in post-war history to win welterweight, light middleweight and middleweight titles. Altogether, as an amateur, Calzaghe won an astonishing 110 of his 120 fights.

It is a tribute to a father-son relationship quite possibly unique in sport that Calzaghe never lost a fight either as a pro or an amateur while Enzo trained him enabling him to retire with a legacy unique in boxing history.

Don’t miss tomorrow’s exclusive Joe Calzaghe column in the Argus where he explains the reasons for hanging up his gloves.