While it would be wrong to say that news of a positive performance-enhancing drugs test in boxing is cause for celebration, there is a silver lining to be found whenever a fight is cancelled on account of one. As depressing as it is, the only thing worse than news of a failed drugs test is when we experience an extended period without one, during which silence can be interpreted as the sound of incompetence rather than the sound of either boxers behaving or the sport cleaning itself up.
Each positive test is usually a sign of two things. It is, on the one hand, a sign of how difficult it is to trust a boxer these days, while on the other it shows the sport is at least trying to catch the careless ones out. This means, depending on your viewpoint, and your general disposition, that news of a positive test can be considered either depressing or encouraging – or perhaps both.
In the case of Dennis McCann, removed from a super-bantamweight fight against Peter McGrail, the first emotion we felt when hearing of his failed test was disappointment. Yet, as always, this disappointment was soon replaced by relief and a perverse satisfaction, owing mainly to the fact that (a) McCann had been pulled from a fight in which he had no right to partake and (b) drugs-testing had been applied and effective ahead of Saturday’s card in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. After all, whenever a boxer is withdrawn from a fight due to this kind of transgression, it stands as an example of the sport getting something right. It is painful, yes, to see good fights go to waste and good fighters tainted by an asterisk, yet the alternative is a far more bleak and dangerous proposition to have to consider.
Already the sport is haunted by the many fights it has allowed to go ahead with either one or both participants unclean. Whole legacies, in fact, have been built and celebrated during times when drugs-testing in the sport was so primitive it was but a mere inconvenience for the ones at the top and an alien concept for the ones lower down.
Tough though it is to accept, many of the fighters we all call heroes were also cheats. Plenty, too, will have found their way on to various hall-of-fame ballots simply by virtue of having done their good/dirty work at a time when it was considerably harder to get caught. Now, when not posing for pictures, these lucky men commentate on fights, offer punditry, and stand at ringside as though they represent the moral standard to which every fledgling fighter should aspire.
Had they been properly tested, these fighters, things might have been different and the course of history might have changed. However, it’s just as true to say that a fighter can only play within the rules of their day and that to some extent getting away with it is not the fighter’s fault. Most of them, if pressed, would be quick to say, “Yeah, but everybody does it, so it would be foolish of me not to”.
That won’t ever be an excuse used publicly – for it would be not only honest but an admission of guilt – but it is certainly the excuse fighters afford themselves when in bed at night knowing that the day’s training session had been aided by a substance on the banned list. Because of all the potential hurdles, that is maybe the biggest for a boxer committed to cheating and it will only be eclipsed, in terms of size, when they get their timings wrong and the testers expose their cheating to the world. It is at that stage words like “contamination” are rolled out and a whole process begins, one deliberately convoluted so as to confuse the public and exhaust them to the point of throwing up their hands and no longer caring. All of a sudden two years have passed and the boxer returns.
As for McCann, one wonders what the future holds. So far details of his failed test are sketchy in the extreme, and the only thing we know for sure is that an adverse finding means he won’t be boxing on Saturday in Riyadh. Beyond that, all that has come to light is that he recently worked with Dr Usman Sajjad, the same man who faced scrutiny when Conor Benn failed more than one drugs test in 2022. Benn, like McGrail, had been proudly working with Dr Usman ahead of his ill-fated fight against Chris Eubank Jnr and had been eager to tell the world. He too had posed for a photograph with the doctor at the beginning of camp and he too had said some nice things about him on social media.
In hindsight, the flaunting of these types of relationships seems somewhat naïve, yet the constant need for attention is of course the disease of many these days – boxers and doctors alike. In fact, not content with just posting pictures with boxers, Dr Usman Sajjad has also spoken with reckless abandon about the prevalence of PEDs in boxing, even going so far as to appear on a podcast to discuss the issue in detail.
“You would have to be an idiot to fail a drug test in England,” he said on a podcast called Quality Shot Boxing, “because urine-testing is just 72 hours, so it means you would have had to take drugs in the last two or three days. The urine test is after a fight, whereas the one that trips up a lot of athletes is if you sign up to the random drug-testing, which the World Anti-Doping Agency [WADA] do. They will basically have a thing where they can track where you are and they can turn up to your house whenever and do a blood test on you. Blood tests 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. A lot of athletes can take very fast-acting testosterone or growth hormones which can leave your body – they can only be in your body for seven or eight hours. So you can take them at nine or 10pm and they’ll be out of your system by seven or eight in the morning. Does that make sense? There are ways to get around it. They may take a diuretic to flush out what they’ve been taking. There’s a lot of tricks, especially when you get to the higher level; the elite level; world level. They’ll find every possible way of winning. When they’re out of camp, when they’re not in training camp, unless they are enrolled in the WBC’s Clean Boxing all-year-round random blood testing, what’s stopping them doping when they are out of season and out of camp? Does that make sense?”
Frankly, the ease with which boxers dupe testing agencies makes far more sense, and is easier to understand, than the idea of electing to discuss the issue at length on some random podcast. Indeed, even now, two years on, it is still difficult to determine what the incentive was for Dr Usman Sajjad to be so transparent about a process in which he will claim no involvement whatsoever. Was it, in the end, a simple desire for online attention? Or was it instead an attempt to both show his intelligence and demonstrate that he knows how it all works?
Either way, that interview over Zoom from two years ago did the medicine man no favors. Whereas once he was anonymous, now suddenly he had a name and a face, and now people wanted to know more about this “Sports Doctor and GP” with such knowledge of PEDs. Now photos of him with boxers, including Benn and Tyson Fury, were provided with a relevance they previously lacked. Now it is to him people look, perhaps unfairly, whenever a boxer with links to him becomes the very “idiot” of which the doctor spoke.
And yet, as contradictory as it may sound, and as hard as it is to believe, boxing needs more idiots. The more of them we find, the more we get to know, and the smarter we in turn become.
Read the full article here