Ukraine's Vasyl Lomachenko’s history-making plan to win a world title in only his second professional fight looks on track after his debut win over Jose Ramirez in Las Vegas last Saturday night.

The phenomenal former amateur decked Ramirez twice en-route to a fourth-round stoppage and is now being touted for a shot at WBO featherweight champion Orlando Salido in New York on January 25.

Meanwhile, Lomachenko’s former Ukraine international team-mate Oleksandr Usyk confirmed last month he had also opted to turn professional, signing with the Klitschko brothers’ K2 organisation.

K2 chief executive Alexander Krassyuk was not shy in singing Usyk’s praises, insisting: “Oleksandr was born the same day as Muhammad Ali (January 17) and that is not an accident.

“With all his skills and experience we expect within a couple of years Usyk will gain the right to fight for a world title.”

The departures of Lomachenko and Usyk to the recognised professional ranks is a blow to International Amateur Boxing Association (AIBA) president Ching-kuo Wu, who had hoped to convince his code’s biggest names to remain under the auspices of his fledgling AIBA Professional Boxing (APB) banner.

Instead the latest World Amateur Championships got under way in Almaty, Kazakhstan, this week shorn of most of those major stars who had made the London 2012 competition such a major success.

And although a number of those who remain, including Welshmen Fred Evans and Andrew Selby, have signed pre-contract agreements with APB, there remain as yet few signs of the competition — initially scheduled for an autumn 2013 launch — getting under way.

An APB spokesperson said the launch of the competition would now take place in 2014 once a schedule had been established in order to ensure it did not overlap with AIBA’s World Series of Boxing competition.

Ironically, it is the continuing lack of clarity over APB, and more specifically its rules that appear to prevent its boxers competing in any events which do not constitute either an Olympic Games or an Olympic qualifier, which is driving boxers away.

Ireland’s Olympic bantamweight silver medallist John Joe Nevin finally lost patience with the governing body last month when, having initially signalled his intention to stay within the ranks for Rio, he withdrew from the World Championship team and signalled his intention to turn professional in the United States.

Belfast flyweight Michael Conlan is another who recently changed his mind.

Having expressed his desire to stay amateur but concern over an APB statute which would appear to prevent him fighting in competitions such as the Commonwealth Games or his own national championships, he is expected to follow Nevin in turning professional after Almaty.

AIBA says APB-contracted boxers will be eligible for “World Olympic qualifiers or any Continental Olympic qualifier and any pre-requisite to the boxer’s qualification for participation to the Olympic qualifier.”

But there is clearly not enough clarity to convince the likes of Lomachenko, surely once courted as a prospective jewel in the crown of APB, and whose decision to move into the conventional professional ranks seems to speak volumes for its ultimate fate.