Steward, who eventually owned the gym, trained more than 30 world champions there and elsewhere, among them Julio César Chávez, a six-time world champion in three different weight classes; Oscar De La Hoya, who won 10 world titles in six classes; the former heavyweight champion Leon Spinks; and, most recently, Klitschko, the reigning heavyweight champion. Among Steward’s crowning achievements as a trainer were Holyfield’s upset of Riddick Bowe to regain the world heavyweight title in 1993 and Lewis’s eighth-round knockout of Mike Tyson in 2002 for the heavyweight crown. Steward was also a longtime commentator for HBO Sports. A genial, fatherly presence in a sport not known for soft speech, Steward had an eye for up-and-coming fighters and a Balanchinian skill at molding movement. “I keep things simple, and I give everybody their own individuality,” Steward told The Commercial Appeal of Memphis in 2007. “You never see all my fighters fight the same way. I find the best punches and movements that are the most natural for the coordination of their body types.” Steward was by his own account as interested in what made a fighter tick outside the ring as in it. He typically visited boxers in their homes or took them to live in his. If he determined that they were not eating well enough, he cooked for them. He even tried to confer a sartorial advantage on his fighters. When Lewis first came to him, one of the changes Steward made immediately was to jettison the black shoes he wore in the ring. “You can’t feel quick in black shoes,” Steward told The Orange County Register in 2000. Emanuel Steward was born on July 7, 1944, in Bottom Creek, W. Va., and began boxing at 8 after receiving a pair of Jack Dempsey gloves for Christmas. When he was about 11, his parents divorced, and he moved with his mother and sisters to Detroit. Fighting as a bantamweight, Steward compiled a 94-3 record as an amateur boxer, winning the national Golden Gloves championship in 1963. He was considered a contender for the 1964 Olympic team, but, needing to support his family, he left boxing and became an electrician for Detroit Edison. Then, in the early 1970s, Steward’s teenage half-brother, James, came from West Virginia to live with him. James wanted to box, and the two of them found their way to Kronk, where James became Emanuel’s first disciple. Soon other fighters were coming to the gym to train with Steward, and before long he was driving the Kronk team to bouts around the country. Those were lean years: Steward once had to sell his watch to buy gasoline. His illustrious stable — the trainer gets a percentage of the fighter’s purse — would eventually make him wealthy. Over time, Steward owned Rolls-Royces, a Lincoln and a Jaguar. (In 1998, he was obliged to pay the Internal Revenue Service more than $1 million in back taxes, penalties and interest.) Steward’s marriage to Marie Steele ended in divorce. Besides Ruiz, the executive director of the Kronk Gym Foundation, his survivors include two daughters, Sylvette Steward and Sylvia Steward; and two sisters, Diane Steward-Jones and Laverne Steward. The Kronk Gym closed in 2006; Steward continued training fighters elsewhere in Detroit. Steward, who was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1996, appears to have retained his eye for talent to the end. As Steward-Jones told The Detroit Free Press on Thursday, he spent much of his recent hospital stay trying to sign the male nurses he encountered there to fight for him.

In a country where politics in recent years has focused almost entirely on the bitter rivalry between President Yanukovich and the jailed former prime minister, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, Mr. Klitschko, 41, is emerging as a serious force.

The acronym for Mr. Klitschko’s party, Udar, spells the word “punch” in Ukrainian, and polls show it surging into second place, ahead of the opposition coalition that includes Ms. Tymoshenko’s party, Fatherland, but still trailing the governing Party of Regions and its allies.

The precise makeup of Parliament, called the Verkhovna Rada, will not be known until weeks after Sunday’s voting because half of the 450 seats will be filled by individual candidates not required to declare a party affiliation. The other half are filled proportionally through voting for party lists.

The election is being watched closely as a gauge of democracy in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic of 45 million, once viewed as on a steady track toward integration with Europe after the Orange Revolution of 2004.

But the country has become increasingly isolated since Mr. Yanukovich’s election in a runoff with Ms. Tymoshenko in 2010.

Control of Parliament will also be a major factor in the higher-stakes presidential contest in 2015.

Mr. Yanukovich’s government has taken aggressive steps to show the elections as fair, even installing Web cameras in more than 30,000 polling stations.

Officials say that Ukraine is being unfairly maligned in the West, largely based on the case of Ms. Tymoshenko, who they insist was legitimately convicted on charges related to the alleged rigging of natural gas contracts with Russia.

Sergey Tigipko, a vice prime minister, said in an interview that Mr. Yanukovich’s administration had steered Ukraine out of the financial crisis, with solid growth since 2010, improvements in social services, and increases in pensions.

Mr. Tigipko said that record would help the Party of Regions win support not just from its base, in the Russian-speaking predominantly east and south of the country, but also in the center and the Ukrainian-speaking west.

“The economic growth and the improvement in social standards should convince people,” Mr. Tigipko said.

But financial analysts say that the country’s economy is in trouble again as a result of flagging demand in Europe, particularly for steel, Ukraine’s main export.

Critics, including senior Western leaders, say Mr. Yanukovich’s government has a long way to go to prove its commitment to democracy.

In an opinion column inThe New York Times this week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs, described “worrying trends” in Ukraine, including “reports of the use of administrative resources to favor the ruling party candidates.”

But no critic has been as harsh as Ms. Tymoshenko, who looms large in Ukraine’s political life, even from prison.