The last decade of boxing has been mired in doping scandals, Saudi Arabia’s influence, the return of the mob, and the fights that never were.
Somehow, the heavyweight division has unearthed an undisputed champion from nearly a decade of chaos and miraculously on Saturday, Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury will do it all again in one of the most significant bouts of the 21st century in Riyadh.
Whatever the route, some will feel the end justifies the means.
These are two fighters who captured the imagination like few others: Usyk, balancing world titles with patriotic duties on the front line of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, Fury overcoming his own demons to vie for a comeback story that would trump even his own reputation for unlikely triumph.
There will nevertheless be a suspicion that Fury had his chance to write his name in history among the top handful of greats, but that the boat has now been missed.
At their peaks, the Anthony Joshua fight never happened – pundit Steve Bunce estimated that 50-60 dates or claims were set in six months about who would fight who. Joshua-Wilder never got off the ground either.
AJ and Fury might have been justified in believing they would have the number of Usyk, by trade and size a cruiserweight who made relatively light work of them both.
The most infamous of those collapsed match-ups included Fury’s notorious shout-out video in June 2020 thanking Daniel Kinahan for agreeing “the biggest fight in British boxing history” against Joshua.
That was several months after Europol had identified a gang linked to Kinahan as one of the most prominent cocaine importers in Europe.
The bloody feud pitting the Kinahans against the Hutch family had been in sway since 2015 but took its time to penetrate boxing circles.
By 2016, and the shooting at a weigh-in at the Regency Hotel in which one Kinahan associate David Byrne was left dead, the ripples around the sport could not be contained.
It took seven years for Katie Taylor to bring a fight of any real significance back to the Irish capital and even then, serious security concerns remained.
Kinahan’s boxing empire was forged in a Marbella gym in 2012 and at its pinnacle, his company MTK Global became the largest boxing management firm in Europe.
It ultimately collapsed – though ongoing allegations suggested his involvement in other promotional companies.
After the US imposed sanctions on the family in 2022, a number of fighters who had counted among his associates were also barred from entry to the country; others, one fighter told The i Paper, were left in limbo, uncertain whether to even attempt to face American opponents over the water.
It was hardly the game’s first rodeo; Kinahan was no Frankie Carbo, the US mobster who dominated promotions between the war years but nobody could plead ignorance.
Into that vacuum stepped Mohammed bin Salman, who with a 2034 World Cup in Riyadh finally has the crown jewel in the Saudi sportwashing machine.
In boxing we were here long ago – the first major fight took place between Callum Smith and George Groves in the Gulf state in 2017 – but the Saudis reach has become global, even transforming Wembley into a mini-Saudi metropolis when Daniel Dubois met Joshua earlier this year.
When one Telegraph journalist wrote a scathing preview, he says his accreditation was revoked.
The quietened halls of Riydh are still a far cry from the Prime-guzzling Misfits that pack the halls closer to home.
The antidote to influencer boxing is to see it as the symptom and not the disease; further still, it has engaged new audiences, few of whom you will find at York Hall on a Friday night.
But with some inevitability, the mainstream sport became engulfed, pricking at great reputations in the process – Mike Tyson chief among them.
We have seen everything from the banal to the freakish and grotesque, perhaps little wonder when anarchy reigns so freely in the air.
Governing bodies cannot decide a mandatory challenger among them; world title fights are orchestrated from interim belts that do not warrant the name; fighters like Jack Catterall lose out on titles due to incomprehensible scorecards and nothing is done.
What should have been moments dripping with anticipation – Amir Khan vs Kell Brook, Floyd Mayweather vs Manny Pacquiao, Terence Crawford vs Errol Spence Jr – stalled to the point where plenty had lost interest by the time they actually occurred. The heavyweight division was guiltiest of all, Frank Warren intermittently branding it “a mess”.
Even the Olympics has been tarnished by Kremlin links to the body running its boxing operation at the International Boxing Association.
It left little room for treating two of this summer’s competitors, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting with the requisite dignity, or the wider sport with any clarity.
Judging and scoring at the Games has been brought into question so regularly that boxing is unlikely to have a place at LA 2028.
That is a pity for the US, in particular, which briefly seemed to be the dam stemming the tide – all the best fights were felt to be happening stateside but that breath of fresh air was cut painfully short by authorities allowing Ryan Garcia to fight Devin Haney despite failing drugs tests the day before and the day of their encounter, which was later ruled a no-contest.
There was considerable appetite too for Conor Benn to fight in the Middle East while banned from stepping into a British ring following two failed drugs tests, a suspension later lifted by the National Anti-Doping Panel.
The problem was that any such fight would put the British license of any opponent at risk too.
Fury, Khan, Dillian Whyte and Alexander Povetkin have all previously been suspended for taking banned substances.
Faith in boxing has rarely been more fragile.
Who, in the current roster, can expect names on the signposts around Madison Square Garden for future generations like Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali?
Fury and Usyk desperately need to deliver something spectacular.
