For many who look at boxing’s greater good, the subject of governance is a bone of contention.
Former Arizona senator John McCain, before he passed away, attempted to create federal reform, but still – around the globe – boxing’s many faults are played out to an increasingly disinterested audience.
The likes of Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson might attract eyeballs, but it causes plenty more to roll theirs. The lack of true punishment for drug cheats and those who have failed tests often makes the sport a laughing stock, too.
This is not a sport in which you’re trying to jump higher, run faster … it is one where you are punching someone in the face, and some boxers take chemicals so they can do that faster, harder and for longer.
Boxing has never had its house in order, and it’s no closer to having it that way now. But there is a growing faction of those despairing the direction of its moral compass.
The barriers to entry are futile, meaning it is a magnet for undesirables – and always has been. And it also means that fighters can be preyed upon by those claiming to be doing good when actually they’re doing harm.
There are groups and organizations, such as the Ring of Brotherhood, the Ringside Charitable Trust and the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association, that try to help level the playing field and look after fighters during and after their careers.
But none of them have wholesale backing from boxing’s supreme power brokers and financiers.
VADA, run by Hall of Famer Dr Margaret Goodman, is known as the best drug-testing agency used in boxing. It has caught far more fighters doping than any of its competitors.
But VADA can’t mete out punishments. It can’t ban or suspend fighters. It has a tough enough time fending off lawsuits from the high-priced lawyers hired by fighters attempting to clear their name.
As hard as VADA tries to catch cheating athletes, there are “coaches” out there trying to beat the system, and – if caught – the fighters have attorneys ready to battle even harder to get them off.
The dice are loaded – and not in VADA’s favor.
It can do only so much.
In 2024, two huge shows – in Texas and Saudi Arabia – were staged on the same weekend. Tyson fought Paul and Gilberto Ramirez boxed Chris Billam-Smith in the bill-toppers.
Millions of eyeballs. All that money. But BoxingScene understands that several major bouts were not subject to any drug testing.
That night, Tevin Farmer boxed William Zepeda and lost a close and hard-fought decision in Riyadh on a card overseen by the Association of Boxing Commissions.
Billam-Smith, as a high-profile British fighter, is also subject to whereabouts testing with UK Anti-Doping. He also paid for VADA testing, which the promoter – Golden Boy – took out of his purse. But Farmer said he had not been tested.
“Why wasn’t me and Zepeda drug-tested?” he said. “I asked multiple times in the locker room before we fought. They said, ‘After the fight.’ And still no test. I’m just saying, boxing is dirty. You never know. Thank you to all my supporters.”
Farmer, who along with Zepeda will be VADA-tested for their scheduled return March 29 in Mexico, is not the only fighter who clearly wants to see more done. Errol Spence Jnr, inactive since his loss in summer 2023 to Terence Crawford in Las Vegas, posted on social media earlier this year: “I really could be training taking PEDs juiced up for 2 yrs taper off & kill someone. It’s nothing in place to protect these boxers. Especially if your not a elite fighter they don’t give a fuck about you.”
It clearly matters to some fighters, but perhaps not nearly enough.
Advocacy for better testing is not just positive PR or virtue signaling. It’s an effort to save the sport from becoming something completely different from what those who defend it so vigorously claim it is.
A lack of governance is, of course, not just an issue in the US.
In the UK, a doctor named Dr Usman Sajjad has made many headlines for his work with, among others, Tyson Fury, Conor Benn and Dennis McCann.
While Fury, Benn and McCann have all posted positive tests, there is no evidence that implicates Dr Sajjad or connects to his involvement.
Yet Dr Sajjad has openly discussed ways to beat PED testing. The British Boxing Board of Control recently sent a message to its licence holders stating that it will not accept medical documentation for his work.
The Board’s notice read: “Re:- Medical Officer Dr Usman Sajjad – With regard to the above, please note that Dr Sajjad is not a registered Medical Officer with the British Boxing Board of Control and therefore, no medical documentation will be accepted at the Board’s Head Office undertaken by Dr Sajjad.”
Robert Smith, general secretary of the British Boxing Board of Control, told BoxingScene: “We have sent out notices to all licence holders to say that he is not registered with the Board. I’ve written to him, saying he can’t do any more work for us. We stopped him working shows when the Benn [failed] tests came in [2022]. It’s difficult to stop people from going to him, because he is actually a doctor. But we have made it clear that he can’t do any work for us at all. He is no longer registered with us – and we don’t licence doctors, we only register them. He is not registered with the Board.”
In his day job, Sajjad works out of Alphagenix, which is listed as having one office in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and another in Dubai.
A mission statement on the Alphagenix website reads: “Passionate about improving the quality of life for men throughout the UK through education, investigation, diagnosis and the treatment of low testosterone levels.”
A feature about the company in This Week in FM reads: “Alphagenix has a team of private doctors provided by BMP Medical Ltd who are all UK-trained and registered with the General Medical Council (GMC). They continue to work in the NHS and private consulting. Alphagenix’s services are registered and regulated by the Care Quality Commission in the UK. Clinical lead for Alphagenix is Dr Usman Sajjad, a GP with a special interest in sports exercise medicine, as well as the andropause.
Having qualified as a doctor in 2014 from the University of Leeds and as a GP in 2020, Dr Sajjad has worked in top-level sports such as Premier League football, rugby, and professional boxing. He is employed as the personal doctor for several high-profile professional boxers, some of whom are reigning world champions. Having suffered personally from severe hypogonadism for a lot of 2020, Dr Sajjad understood how low testosterone impacted physical and mental health. He also competed as a super heavyweight amateur boxer from 2010 to 2014.”
According to that article, it was Sajjad’s own experiences and recovery that led to him joining Alphagenix to help men in similar situations.
A call from BoxingScene to the Alphagenix office was briskly curtailed: “I can’t comment on anything like that,” said an unidentified responder. “I’m sorry. The company won’t be able to comment on any doctors or anyone who works for us. Sorry about that, I’ll have to end the call.”
BoxingScene reached out to Dr Sajjad for comment, but he has not responded directly. He did, however, reach out via a third party to say that phone calls to Alphagenix would potentially cost him work. And the channel he used was through an athlete who has positively tested for multiple PEDs in the past.
Still, while Sajjad might not be welcomed by the Board, he has always been vociferously defended by fighters with whom he has worked, including Fury and Anthony Fowler.
“Usman is a good guy,” Fury told Boxing News in 2022 when asked about Usman’s potential involvement in Conor Benn’s positive tests. “I have known him for about a year, and he works with quite a lot of boxers, and whatever happens I would definitely say it has nothing to do with Usman. Usman will be working with me for my next fight [Derek Chisora III, in December 2022]. I trust him 100 per cent.”
“Everyone’s blaming Dr Usman for the Conor Benn failed test,” Fowler posted on Twitter in October 2022. “This is bullshit. Uz’s a friend of mine, he’s a good guy... The guy [Sajjad] is upset, because he’s getting the blame for it all.”
The sentiment is the same from light heavyweight contender Lewis Edmondson, who is managed by Billy Joe Saunders.
Edmondson, coming off a big win over Dan Azeez and ready to box March 1 in Bournemouth, England, told BoxingScene: “I know him, yeah, and was working with him, yeah. I don’t know anything about what’s going on. Why would I not [work with him]? There’s no weirdness going on, there’s no dodginess going on, so why would I not? He’s a doctor and he helps me through my injuries, but I don’t know anything about all of that.”
The brightest lights on Usman were shone by himself, via his podcast, “The Doctor Uz Podcast” (which has subsequently been taken down from major platforms) and his appearance on the “QualityShot Boxing” podcast. The latter, in which Usman estimates that “80-90 per cent” of boxers take performance-enhancing drugs, has since been widely distributed through boxing.
“If you’re like an elite-level boxer – we’re talking Sky pay-per-view, world class, European level – yeah, 80 to 90 per cent are doing it, from what I’m seeing,” he said. “And when I say doping, it’s not just steroids – you’ve got all sorts. You’ve got IV fluid infusions after weigh-ins, you’ve got diuretics, you know, you’ve got growth hormones, you’ve got testosterone replacement. There’s just a lot of stuff. You may have these pre-workout drinks that are banned – anything, when you say doping. It doesn’t just mean steroid use. There’s a whole list of substances which are banned by World Anti-Doping.”
During the podcast, Dr Sajjad said fighters are his favorite athletes to work with because they’re grateful and loyal. “They’re almost like very vulnerable,” he said. “Vulnerable. I think that’s the word. Very vulnerable.”
As a doctor, Sajjad said he has also helped fighters by providing advice about head injuries and concussions, something often overlooked and something that, of course, should be applauded.
But it was his knowledge of drug-testing systems that made the headlines.
“A lot of the time how the drug-testing system works, all the fights in the UK, is urine testing, OK?” he said. “So you have to be an idiot to fail a drug test in England, because urine testing is just 72 hours, so it means you would have taken drugs in the last two to three days, so you’ve got to take some drugs two to three days before you fight - and urine tests is after a fight. Whereas the one that trips up a lot of athletes is, if you sign up to the random drugs testing – which the World Anti-Doping Agency do, WADA – they will have a thing where they can track you where you are and they can turn up to your house whenever and do a blood test on you.
“With the blood test, things stay in your system for a month, so they can catch things that have been there for a month. However, you can get around the random drug testing because between the hours of 11pm and 7am, they’re not allowed to come to your house. So a lot of athletes can take very fast-acting testosterone or growth hormones, which can leave your body and can only be in your body [for] seven or eight hours. So you could take it at sort of 9 or 10pm and it would be out of your system by 7 or 8 in the morning. Does that make sense? There are ways that you can get around it. There’s a lot of ways.”
A former client of Dr Sajjad’s told BoxingScene that the doctor was “a TRT specialist” and said that clomiphene was widely prescribed to him and others by Sajjad. The client, who said he received clomiphene because he had low testosterone levels that affected his mood and overall health, claimed the doctor used a WhatsApp group with more than 150 people in which he would instruct patients on how to inject and how much to use while sharing other information.
“He prescribes everybody [clomiphene],” said the client. “The majority of the group are on it. There’s 152 in the group and there’s more than 100 on clomiphene.”
Then, discussing how he felt with clomiphene in his system, the client said: “It’s hard not to know you’re taking it. And I know it’s just a tablet, but the way it makes you feel, you know that you’re taking something. Think of those mornings when you have brain fog. It’s like brain fog doesn’t exist. Everything’s really clear. You’ve got loads of energy. Your sleep is perfect. It’s weird just from one 50mg tablet, but you sleep perfectly. You’re really alert. You put on loads of muscle.”
The client claimed to have gained approximately 14lbs of muscle in around six months.
“You’re just generally a nicer person to be around,” he went on. “You’re more motivated. My motivation’s through the roof, taking this.”
The client added, in reference to clomiphene, that an athlete who knows his body would “100 per cent” know he’s on something.
Also on the “QualityShot Boxing” podcast, Dr Sajjad pointed out that unless a fighter was enrolled in the WBC’s Clean Boxing Program, with year-round random blood testing, they could take anything while they’re not in camp because of the loopholes that exist in the sport.
Again, it’s important to note that Sajjad has not been found to have committed any wrongdoing.
One of Sajjad’s clients was Dennis McCann, who in December tested positive for drostanolone, trenbolone and 19-norandrosterone.
The first two substances have been reported, but BoxingScene sources informed us of the third.
According to SNAC boss Victor Conte, whose knowledge of performance-enhancing drugs is recognised as encyclopaedic, 19- norandrosterone “is a metabolite of a parent anabolic steroid called nandrolone. The trade name is Deca-Durabolin. The street name is Deca. It is also known as the ‘nail in the coffin steroid’ because of how long it is detectable. Minimum of six months and often detectable for a year. There is a case where it was still detectable after 18 months. This steroid would never be an option for a tested athlete. The testosterone-decca ‘stack’ is the most famous ‘stack’ in bodybuilding. Jose Canseco said that this stack was used by him and Mark McGwire who were known as the ‘Bash Brothers’. Decca is known for having a positive effect upon ligaments and tendons which can become stiff with steroid use.”
Asked whether it would be effective if used with drostanolone and trenbolone, Conte said: “Trenbolone is known to make muscles hard. It is also harsh on the liver. They put trenbolone pellets in the ears of cows to make them more lean and a greater yield of beef. Trenbolone is a powerful steroid that should not be used by females. It will cause virilization in women. Their voices become much lower and it will also cause women to grow facial hair. Drostanolone is a commonly used steroid by bodybuilders. It is trademarked as Masteron.”
Conte then offered: “If there was intentional doping by McCann, whoever was advising him must not have understood the clearance times of these steroids. These three steroids are easily detectable for a long period. Anybody with knowledge of the clearance times of these steroids would never use them with a tested athlete.”
Those three substances, another source told BoxingScene, can be “stacked” and given in an injection.
The attorney representing McCann declined to comment. The fighter, who as of this writing has not been charged with any rule-breaking and insists he’s done nothing wrong, has since been given until March 22 to provide the WBO with an explanation for the failed test. His B-sample is yet to be analyzed.
But will boxing get to the bottom of what has happened? Does it want to? If it does, why do those involved on all sides of so many of these cases have to sign non-disclosure agreements, even if they’re on the victim’s side?
Even if there weren’t loopholes that pre-exist in the sport, someone somewhere always seems to find a gap.
“It’s very complicated,” the WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman said to BoxingScene. “Boxing is regulated in different manners worldwide. It is a sport that is regulated one way in the United States where each boxing commission belongs to a state and they are completely autonomous and they have their own rules. In the UK, it’s a national entity – the British Boxing Board of Control. You go to Mexico, every state has a commission. And in Mexico, many states allow municipal boxing commissions. So in Mexico there’s many boxing commissions; if you go to Japan, Philippines, every country has a different organisation for sanctioning the sport.
“Boxing is a violent sport; it’s a dangerous sport; it’s a contact sport. It is not a game where you make distance or speed or goals. If you cheat and if you have doping in boxing, you can hurt your opponent, so we take drug testing as a high priority, high importance and the WBC is the first organisation which introduced mandatory drug testing back in ‘75, and we have the Clean Boxing Program which has been working since 2015 [actually 2016]. We have spent a fortune and we are passionate about drug testing; we only wish more organisations, more commissions, more promoters would put emphasis on drug testing.
“It is a top priority for the WBC. I know many promoters have it as a top priority, I have seen promoters that they themselves contract fights to be mandatorily tested, with competition randomly, and that is the key. Because we have to protect our fighters – even though I’m certain there are very few fighters who’d do something knowingly to make an advantage that could hurt their opponent.
“It’s a matter that must be open. It has to be continuously discussed because we should not talk about drug testing every once in a while but continuously, and I encourage it.”
But boxing not only doesn’t like to put its stars on the naughty step, it handsomely rewards them. Many of the top stars find themselves as the sport’s best-paid athletes. Rather than being blackballed, they return to significant paychecks. And testing positive is certainly no barrier to entry to the International Boxing Hall of Fame or even working in the media.
One lower-ranked fighter, recently in contact with BoxingScene about taking on a boxer who had previously failed a test, knows exactly how the economics of the sport work.
“I would probably sign a contract saying he can use all the drugs he wants just to make sure a fight gets over the line,” he wrote.
And as much as there are efforts from those trying to circumvent testing and then exonerate fighters who have failed tests, there are those also simply trying to make sure the news never comes out at all. Backdated and silent bans are very real things, and in today’s era of limited activity for top fighters they remain almost impossible to detect.
Earlier in February BoxingScene’s Matt Christie reported that Alexander Povetkin is serving a four-year “period of ineligibility” following an investigation into his old samples. Carried out as part of wider study into doping in Russia and led by the International Testing Agency, ostarine was found to be in his system prior to beating Carlos Takam in 2014.
In a separate case, Povetkin had served a ban in 2016 for taking banned substances but he returned and waltzed into a number of high-profile, lucrative bouts. This period of ineligibility will end in 2028. Povetkin is 45 years old.
In 2017 a federal court in New York awarded Deontay Wilder damages of almost $5m after their scheduled fight in Russia in 2016 was cancelled three weeks before it was due to happen, when Povetkin tested positive for meldonium. But Povetkin’s team battled the judgment through an appeals court, which ultimately dismissed claims from both sides.
With the news about Povetkin, the promoter Lou DiBella, who was working with Wilder at the time, took to Twitter and wrote: “Steroid testing in #boxing is a fucking joke. @WBCBoxing program included. The WBC subjective, “we can do whatever we want” rules were EXACTLY the reason for the court overturning the $4million judgment of the jury! …”
DiBella continued: “POVETKIN was rewarded with his biggest career $$$ AFTER being a known cheat.”
The case DiBella cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
We are no longer surprised. This is also the house in which Paul fought a near 60-year-old Tyson and where the 59-year-old Oliver McCall recently fought again in Nashville. And he’s due to box there again on March 18.
It was his second bout there in three months. BoxingScene reached out to the commission for comment when McCall made his bow there in November 2024, and was told: “The fight has been approved. Based on our rules, professional combatants who are thirty-five years of age or older shall have a neurological examination by a neurologist or neurosurgeon and submit a medical report thereof within thirty days of applying for a license or renewal thereof. The Commission will not issue a licence until it has the opportunity to review the report.”
The spokesman added: “He has a licence, he has met our requirements, and he is scheduled to fight on the 19th [of November].”
McCall is a 77-fight veteran, a former sparring partner of Tyson, and he won the WBC heavyweight title back in 1994, more than 45 contests ago. We also await 52-year-old Ike Ibeabuchi’s return to the ring.
But boxing won’t address these issues now because it never has and it is not fashionable to do so.
What is fashionable is mythical and meaningless PPV ratings, and to go on to debating fights that might or might not happen and to cast blame on who is ducking who.
Nothing to see here. Carry on. See you at the next superfight.