Tributes have poured in from across the world for boxing legend Muhammad Ali, who has died at the age of 74.
“Muhammad Ali shook up the world. And the world is better for it,” said US President Barack Obama.
The three-time world heavyweight champion – one of the world’s greatest sporting figures – died on Friday night at a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona.
He died from “septic shock due to unspecified natural causes”, said a spokesman for the Ali family.
The boxer had been suffering from a respiratory illness, a condition that was complicated by Parkinson’s disease.
“I am happy my father no longer struggles. He is in a better place. God is the greatest,” his daughter Maryum said on Saturday.
Ali’s body is being returned in the next two days to his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, where his funeral is scheduled for Friday afternoon at the KFC Yum! Centre.
The celebration of his life will feature a funeral procession through the town and public celebration. The boxer will be buried in a private service at the city’s Cave Hill Cemetery.
The service will be presided over by an imam and feature eulogies by former President Bill Clinton, sports journalist Bryant Gumber and actor Billy Crystal, reports the BBC.
Many residents of Louisville, Kentucky, woke up on this hazy Saturday morning to the news: Muhammad Ali is dead.
The news of his death is on every local television station, and the front page of the local newspaper reads simply “The Greatest” over the iconic image of Ali standing victorious over Sonny Liston in 1965.
Flags at Louisville’s city hall will fly at half mast today and the mayor will deliver a memorial service there.
Almost everyone has a personal story about Ali, whether it’s a favourite fight, a glance through a car window, or a trip to his boyhood home, which opened as a museum only last week, the interior recreated as if Ali were still living there as a precocious 12-year-old boy in the 1950s.
Ali was as much a campaigner for black equality as he was a champion in the ring, where he won 56 of his 61 fights.
Asked how he would like to be remembered, he once said: “As a man who never sold out his people. But if that’s too much, then just a good boxer.
“I won’t even mind if you don’t mention how pretty I was.”
But he was once a polarising figure in the US. At a time of racial segregation in the 1960s he joined the separatist black sect, The Nation of Islam, which rejected the inclusive approach of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King.
George Foreman, who lost his world title to Ali in the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Kinshasa in 1974, called him one of the greatest human beings he had ever met.
“To put him as a boxer is an injustice,” said Foreman.
