Irish Daily Star - Inside Sport
THE SOUR SCIENCE
Benn drug fail the latest blow to battered boxing
TRY and call it a noble art or the sweet science after the chaos of this week, and you’ll get short shrift.
Boxing has taken a battering before but it’s debatable whether its status has ever been as low as it is now.
Indeed, it’s harder to think of a worse year for the sport.
Think of all that has happened over the past few months.
The US sanctions against Daniel Kinahan which led to exposure of just how deeply he was involved in boxing at the highest level.
The move by the Americans led to the collapse of MTK Global — which had become a major powerbroker in the fight game all over the world.
Kinahan was the king of the sportswashers, but there are plenty more of them in boxing.
Look at the criticism and scrutiny that golf has got for getting in bed with Saudi Arabia.
The fight game has embraced the Saudis with gusto too, but there’s barely a word beyond the tired old trope of ‘that’s boxing’.
At amateur level, the sport is in a crisis that could destroy it.
Here at home, infighting within the IABA has led to a host of boardroom battles and resignations — and Bernard Dunne is the latest in a line of High Performance Directors to cut his losses and head for the exit door.
Amateur
At international level, amateur boxing is in an even worse state — and it now looks certain that it will be gone from the Olympics after Paris 2024.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has had huge concerns about the way the sport is run for a long time, and that’s why it took over the running of the programme in Tokyo last year from the International Boxing Association (IBA),
There is a particular issue with IBA president, Umar Kremlev, a Russian with links to Vladimir Putin.
On September 25, IBA delegates voted against permitting a leadership challenge to Kremlev by 106 votes to 36.
That was widely seen as the death knell for boxing as an Olympic sport.
It is the sport that has given Ireland more success — particularly at Olympic level — than any other, so the reaction here was startling.
Only this newspaper led with the Olympics’ sucker punch the following day. There has been very little reaction since then. All the fawning over Irish boxers every four years was, not for the first time, shown up as hollow posturing.
The future of Irish amateur boxing has never been more uncertain, but the indifference outside the boxing bubble has been stark.
When Kinahan was sanctioned in April, it was shortly before Tyson Fury took on Dillian Whyte.
Questions
Kinahan and Fury worked together for a few years and had been photographed together as recently as February.
But reporters who tried to ask questions about Kinahan were blanked in the run-up to the fight. On the night of the bout, those who had the temerity to write about the situation found that they had been placed in the stands, instead of the usual press ringside seats.
There are plenty within boxing who have tried to move away from traditional media and cultivate newer outlets that effectively operate and act like fans.
When the scrutiny comes, it’s clear that it’s not welcomed. We saw evidence of that this week when it was revealed by a journalist, Riath Al-Samarrai, that Conor Benn had failed a drugs test.
Fathers
Benn was due to fight Chris Eubank Jr tonight at the O2 in London — a much-hyped bout because of the rivalry between both men’s fathers in their own heyday.
On Wednesday, though, Al-Samarrai revealed that Benn tested positive for clomifene, a drug that is normally used to treat infertility in women. Clomifene
also raises testosterone levels, which is why it has sometimes been used as a performance enhancing drug (PED) in sport.
But Benn insists he is a ‘clean athlete’: “I have signed up to every voluntary anti-doping testing there is under the sun. Throughout my whole career I am tested and my UKAD tests have come back negative so I have never had any issues before.
“Even in the lead-up to this fight, my (UKAD) tests have come up negative so my team will find out as to why there has been an initial adverse finding in my test, but as I said as far as I am concerned the fight is going ahead.
“I am a clean athlete and we will get to the bottom of this.”
The British Boxing Board of Control were i nformed on September 23 of the failed test but only moved to cancel tonight’s fight after Al-Samarrai published his story.
The promoters of the fight still tried to push ahead — but eventually had to give up the ghost.
And a planned press conference still took place on Thursday which started with an announcement that no questions would be allowed. That’s boxing.
One of the most pertinent questions of all is this one: would the fight have been allowed to proceed if a journalist hadn’t discovered the positive test?
Doping
There are plenty within the fight game who tell you doping is rife.
There is often an element of farce to the way the sport operates too — with a bewildering array of titles and belts up for grabs.
This week, it was announced that the winner of the clash between Claressa Shields and Savannah Marshall in London on October 15 will be presented with the WBC ‘Elizabethan Belt’.
This is the WBC’s way of honouring the passing of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, with the original fight date postponed because of the period of national mourning in the UK.
WBC President Mauricio Sulaiman met Kinahan in March and wrote in glowing terms about him.
A month later, Sulaiman was doing his best to publicly distance himself from the Dubliner.
It’s 30 years since Queen Elizabeth came up with a memorable phrase ‘ annus horribilis’ to describe a harrowing 12 months for her family.
Has there ever been a more horrible year for boxing than 2022?
The fear, as always with this damaged sport, is that we ain’t seen nothing yet.