A failed test, a wild boar and the lie that could bring down the champion
The Lancashire farmer at the centre of the Tyson Fury storm speaks out...
WHEN Tyson Fury beat Deontay Wilder in Las Vegas last month, the fight was regarded as one of the greatest comebacks in boxing history — and in the history of sport itself.
It not only earned the 31-year-old British heavyweight the World Boxing Council (WBC) title, but saw him widely hailed as one of the greatest boxers of all time.
The victory was an astonishing feat for a man who had been written off because of severe drug and alcohol problems, the scandal arising from his admission — made in 2015 to The Mail on Sunday — that he believed homosexuality and abortion were equivalent to paedophilia, and a sensational doping scandal that had resulted in a backdated two-year suspension in December 2017.
In the post-fight press conference, the self-styled Gypsy King, dressed in a flamboyant floral suit, made sure he acknowledged those who had helped him. ‘A big shout out to my team, my promoters, and everybody who believed in me,’ he said.
But there was somebody that the strutting boxer forgot to thank, either in public or in private. That man was sitting thousands of miles away from the dollar-festooned razzmatazz of the Las Vegas ring, in a small farmhouse a few miles from Preston in Lancashire. And although at the age of 70, Martin Carefoot may be several decades older than Fury — and stands at least a foot shorter than the 6ft 9in boxer — today he is wielding a punch that could see Fury knocked out of the ring for good.
‘I feel sick of the lies and deceit,’ Carefoot says today. ‘The public needs to know the truth.’
Carefoot’s claim is extraordinary, and is rooted in, of all things, the question as to whether Fury ate the flesh and offal — including testicles — of uncastrated wild boars back in 2015.
Although such a question may seem trivial, the consumption of such meat lay at the very heart of the defence mounted by Fury and his cousin, Hughie, when UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) found the presence of the anabolic steroid nandrolone in their urine samples in February 2015.
The Fury cousins and their lawyers maintained that the presence of nandrolone was not because of doping, and suggested it might have been the result of contaminated health and fitness supplements. But there was another, altogether more bizarre claim too: that they had regularly eaten wild boar meat and this diet had been responsible for their raised levels of nandrolone.
It was a powerful defence, not least because there has been scientific evidence — published in an academic journal in 2000 — that reveals that ‘eating tissues of noncastrated male pork… might induce some false accusations of the abuse of nandrolone in anti-doping’.
And to support the case, Fury’s team were able to name Carefoot, a farmer and former butcher, as a regular supplier of boar meat.
The farmer even provided two signed witness statements stating that he had indeed been a supplier to Team Fury and the boxer’s lawyers, Morgan Sports Law — and Carefoot’s evidence was passed to the drugs authorities. These statements are now in the possession of The Mail on Sunday. The two-year case was cripplingly expensive for UKAD, and the compromise judgment of a two-year backdated suspension reached in December 2017 with the Fury cousins just before the hearing came to the National Anti-Doping Panel (NADP) was widely regarded as weighing heavily in favour of the boxers, as it left them immediately free to fight.
But today, Carefoot, who farms around the small town of Longridge on the Preston to Blackburn road, is admitting that those statements were lies — and that he never once supplied any wild boar to Fury or his team.
‘I have never kept wild boar,’ he says. ‘I have never killed a wild boar. The closest I’ve ever got to a wild boar is when we once got some for a customer in the shop, and I actually chopped it up, and that’s the closest I’ve ever come.’
Carefoot does not know whether Tyson or his cousin were themselves aware that he had been asked to give false evidence. But his words will surely raise enormous questions as to the nature of the defence mounted by the Fury cousins against UKAD, and may well see the agency reopening its case against them.
And if any member of Fury’s team is found to have orchestrated a cover-up, then the consequences for the boxer will be very serious.
It all started with a knock on the door of Carefoot’s farmhouse one Tuesday in November 2016. ‘It was this friend of mine, who I knew extremely well,’ recalls Carefoot. ‘And he said: “I need a favour from you”. I never thought twice about it.’ The friend explained to Carefoot that he had a friend on Team Fury who needed some help in getting Fury and his cousin off the charge made against them by UKAD.
‘They (Team Fury) were in a mess and they were panicking,’ says Carefoot. ‘They came to me and said they had a problem. They said just a simple letter to say that I had supplied wild boar. It will help them get them off the hook and I said: “Okay then I’ll do what you say”. I knew the bloke very well, he’d done me a few favours.’
Carefoot says that he wrote the letter that very evening. Addressed ‘to whom it may concern’, the farmer stated: ‘I have supplied uncastrated wild boar to Team Fury at Bolton on a regular basis from January to October 2015 as and when required. I also supplied rabbits and pheasants and free range chicken from time to time.’
Carefoot then signed the letter and gave it to his friend, who then passed it on to the go-between. Carefoot knew that the letter was a lie — and today very much regrets his actions. But at the time, he says, he had no qualms.
‘I didn’t think twice about it,’ he says. ‘I didn’t even worry about it.’
For a short while, Carefoot presumed that was the end of the matter, and continued to run his farm, where he today keeps little more than a few sheep, cows and chickens. Although he did keep pigs, that was many years ago, and he certainly never kept any wild boar.
As the weeks and months went by, however, he found himself drawn ever deeper into the attempts to prove to UKAD that Fury and his
I have never kept wild boar. I have never killed a wild boar. The closest I’ve ever got to one is when we once got some in the shop
cousin had been eating wild boar.
‘Time went on, and they kept ringing me,’ Carefoot continues. ‘They panicked then. It was phone call after phone call, with “can you help us out, we’re in a mess here.” So I just went along with it.’
And then, on November 23, 2016, Carefoot received the first of many emails from Morgan Sports Law, which was acting for Fury. After providing Carefoot with an extensive list of questions concerning his supposed wild boar, the firm came to the point: ‘By way of background, we are seeking to determine whether there was a possibility that meat provided to the Furys might contain certain metabolites of nandrolone (an anabolic steroid). Nandrolone metabolites can be naturally occurring and present in certain meat — hence the level of detail in the questions above.’
There is no suggestion that Morgan Sports Law or any of their employees or representatives were aware that Carefoot was lying, and that members of Team Fury were organising a cover-up. Judging by the emails, the firm was diligent in trying to ascertain whether Carefoot had indeed kept wild boar and had supplied it to the Furys.
BY THAT point, however, Carefoot felt he was in too deep — and continued lying to Morgan Sports Law. In his his first signed witness statement, finalised on 17 January 2017, he stated that he had ‘supplied one fully butchered wild boar pig to Team Fury generally every 3-6 weeks’, and that ‘Team Fury were keen to utilise the whole animal, including liver, kidney and other offal’.
Carefoot also stated that ‘Team Fury were only provided with meat from male wild boar pigs as it was leaner than the female’. It would also contain more naturally occurring steroid, of course. It was a serious claim — the more so as the farmer believes that some members of Team Fury were aware of the cover-up.
Why then, did Carefoot wish to take part in this extraordinary sequence of events?
The answer is simple — he claims that they offered him money to lie, both on paper, and in any forthcoming hearing in front of the NADP.
‘I just went along with it, and they always dangled this carrot that I was going to get paid,’ he says. ‘When things got quite serious, they offered me a sum of money before it went to court in London, and a sum of money after. I went along with them because I suppose in my own way I was just helping them out. Thinking about it now it must have been a daft thing to do.’
Carefoot says he was promised £25,000, a not inconsiderable sum, but perhaps not large enough when considering he was ready to lie to the NADP, which is a tribunal bound by the Arbitration Act 1996, which means providing false evidence and lying at an NADP hearing is as serious an offence as committing perjury in a court of law.
When this issue of whether he was willing to commit perjury was put to Carefoot, he said: ‘I suppose if I’d had to. I was in too deep. They were dangling this carrot. I thought you’re going to get 25 grand for this. I thought it’s not a hanging matter. And so I went along with it. So the answer to that is yes.’
By May 1, 2017, Carefoot had supplied a second witness statement to Morgan Sports Law, which was in turn passed to UKAD. The signed statement reiterated the big lie: ‘I supplied a range of animal meats and offal to Team Fury, including wild boar and pigs.’
In addition, Carefoot supplied
Morgan Sports Law with pictures of wild boar which he claimed were taken on his farm, but which he now admits to The Mail on Sunday were in fact taken at nearby Bowland Wild Boar Park in Chipping.
Carefoot was becoming increasingly anxious by this point, and understandably so, not least because Morgan Sports Law were asking him to attend the longawaited hearing in front of the NADP. One evening, he confided the truth. ‘I was actually advised by a barrister friend of mine at the time that if you go to court in London a top barrister will just rip you apart,’ he says. ‘Totally, absolutely. He’ll see through you.’
In the event, he was saved by the bell. In December 2017, the boxing world was shocked to learn that UKAD and Team Fury had reached a now-notorious compromise, which saw Fury given a comparatively minor sanction — a two-year ban backdated to 2015, which not only allowed him to continue boxing but let him keep the world title he had won from Wladimir Klitschko that same year.
To many, this was little more than a slap on the wrist. There was widespread relief, not least on the part of Carefoot.
‘It felt empty. It felt bad. It was total rubbish,’ he says. ‘So when it got to the stage when it was all thrown out and Fury got his licence back, I had a great sense of relief.’
But that was not the only emotion gathering inside him. Carefoot had never been thanked for his help — and he’d received not a penny of the £25,000 he felt he was owed. Bitterness soon took hold.
‘They said they were going to come up to the farm and thank me very much,’ he says. ‘Well they never did. They never came near. I was told to shut up, be quiet and forget about it. I just felt used and abused. I am happy the public know what all this is about — they had my help and I feel cheated and used. I see Tyson always praises Jesus as he is a Christian — is this how a Christian would behave?’
Today, Carefoot is well aware of the consequences of the lies he told. ‘Without me, Fury wouldn’t have been boxing,’ he says, frankly.
Carefoot is doubtless right, as the false evidence was instrumental in getting Fury back in the ring, and to go on to become the star he is today, complete with an extraordinary back story of redemption, which has earned him millions of fans all over the world. But as Carefoot recalls, it was all down to what seemed like just a small lie.
‘It was the wild boar,’ he says. ‘There was nothing else. But at the time it felt like such a trivial thing, so, so trivial. Petty. It was a really petty thing. But it’s had massive consequences.’
When things got quite serious, they offered me a sum of money before it went to court in London, and a sum of money after