Former IBF flyweight titleholder Sunny Edwards is not sure drug testing in boxing is working and believes the only way of creating a level playing field is to allow the athletes to take anything they choose.
Edwards, who has been tested by VADA and submits to UK Anti-Doping tests year-round, is 21-1 (4 KOs), and he returns on November 30 in a highly anticipated all-Britain clash with 2020 Olympic gold medal winner Galal Yafai.
Edwards, 28, has been vocal about those who have been caught doping before, and in the lead-up to his fight at the Resorts World Arena in Birmingham, England, he told BoxingScene: “This is kind of a sensitive topic for me. Just because me, Sunny Edwards, I get tested a hell of a lot. I would guess I’m one of about the 30-ish top skim of athletes [fighters] that is on one of those 365 whereabouts testing where, basically, for the last three years, I’ve had to register the bed that I’m going to sleep in and where I’m going to be for an hour of my day every single day, as if I’m an AI computer of boxing, and that’s what I got into boxing for.
“For me, it’s a very pressing matter. When there are boxers like Tevin Farmer saying, ‘Look, no one’s been tested,’ why am I on something where I have to open an app on my phone and make sure that every bed I sleep in, I’m letting someone behind a computer know where that is, 365 days a year, in competition or not, for the last three-plus years?
“And, as well, I’m signed up to VADA, so there are weeks where I’m getting tested by multiple governing bodies,” Edwards continued. “It’s the inconsistency for me that’s the real problem. It would be nice to think we live in a world that whatever these testing agents are, they’re going to be completely neutral and completely unbiased and completely fair at every stage of it and that’s how it’s going to be. But, at the same time, we’re dealing with people, so do we really live with that 100 per cent guarantee that that’s going on? I don’t know. For me, I think, if anything, we make the sport less safe by giving restrictions on stuff that humans can find on this Earth to give us benefits to help us prepare or repair our brain, or our muscle tissue, or help us with ligament damage, or from brain swelling.
“A lot of these things do have a lot of benefits, and that’s why the cheaters take them. But at the same time, yeah, I don’t take anything that I’m not supposed to. I live on the bare bones [as a smaller fighter] compared to all these other people who are trying to skim grey areas or getting away with stuff completely because of how good they are at doing it. Because there are definitely going to be scientists that are very good at doing it; there’s just too many stories to say that it doesn’t happen.”
Edwards, however, has never been privy to it taking place, and he feels that is in large part due to his outspoken stance on it. If anyone was doping and saw Edwards, he thinks they would stop doing it or talking about it as soon as they knew he was around. But Edwards remains certain the most unsafe terrain in this already perilous environment is if a “juicer” meets a clean athlete.
“Someone like me would never get brought in the conversation where they’re getting to know if someone’s doing it or not, I’ll tell you that. Because I’ve never seen it first-hand. At the same time, someone outspoken like me who’s gone on half-hour rants previously about these things, I’m never going to be the one that finds out this conversation. No coach in that gym I walk into, no boxer, is going to confide in me. It’s never going to be a conversation I find out, so for me it’s like it never happens because I’m publicly vocal about it. If I wasn’t, then maybe I’d have more of an understanding of how many people are doing it.
“What we do know, though, is we’re dealing with people who are doing one of the hardest things in the world: get up in the ring and fight in front of everyone they know, everyone you’ve ever met and everyone you might meet in the future. So insecure humans, which are very common in 2024, to be insecure at times and about other people cheating – and there are all these stories about other people cheating, and you watch documentaries like Icarus that tell you how easy it is, and all you’ve got to do is do it at certain times of the night and by the time the testers come and get you in the morning, the half-life of it is already lower than the legal amount. … It gets so complicated yet simple, it’s like, we’re not really going to catch the good ones, are we? We’re just going to be catching the rubbish ones and the ones that are fucking up and the ones that get spiked and didn’t think they were doing it. They’re the only ones you’re going to be catching.”
Of fighters being tested, Edwards explained: “If anything, I think that makes the whole thing unsafer and probably would be more satisfying with an environment where people are just doing whatever they want.
“I think there’s clearly too many people that get away with it. I mean, there’s probably corners of this world that are using stuff that the other corners of the world don’t even know exist. Like, what’s the chance of that not being the case? There’s definitely the chance of these mad supplements or things that people are taking and after a few years, then they become something that they look into and ban and for years [after] people were taking it.
“What are we doing here? We’re creating like a list and then there’s some people advising the people that create the list of what should and shouldn’t be, and when they’re doing so, they’re probably, ‘Oh, that one’s OK, I’ll just put in a couple of little grey ones that they can slip through and are never going to work.’ We’re dealing with people doing people things at every level of this pyramid that we’re in. I don’t know, I just feel like the unsafest place in any boxing ring is one person getting in, getting away with having something in their system they’re not supposed to and the other person not. That’s the unsafest, and I don’t think we, clearly, [catch] 100 per cent of [cheaters] to guarantee that.
“Would you not agree that saying, ‘Alright, everyone can take everything’ is as level as a playing field, if not more level, than saying, ‘Alright, well there’s this testing’? Some people are abiding by it, but the ones that are clever and don’t get caught, now look, we have a more and further unlevel playing field than we would have had if we just said, ‘OK, look, in your 8-10 weeks before a fight, whatever you’re taking, whatever your supplements, protein, whatever, it might have some positive [effect]. It might have some negative, but that’s for you to find out.’”
Edwards sounds conflicted. Like he’s not convinced by the stance he is taking, while remaining wholly unconvinced that the situation boxing finds itself in with regard to testing, and how much is carried out by promoters and governing bodies, is not the right one.
“This is always the answer when I think about it,” he concludes. “Because that is the unsafest place, if one person is juiced to the gills and the other person is not. And how are you going to argue it? A clean fighter versus a dirty fighter is the unsafest boxing ring that you’re going to see, and you create that by having things that some people might know how to jump through.”
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