Forget Imane Khelif and focus your energy on Jarrell Miller instead

To conclude a week in which a female Algerian boxer was publicly vilified for having naturally elevated levels of testosterone, boxing will, on Saturday night (August 3), again indulge heavyweight Jarrell Miller, a man whose determined and longtime pursuit of “elevation” has been anything but natural.

Sadly, however, unlike Imane Khelif’s, Miller’s past is not interesting enough, or topical enough, for anyone to take it seriously, or give it a second thought, and therefore he is free to be viewed as just another “boxer” again. 

True for some time, Miller has, since serving a two-year suspension for several performance-enhancing drug transgressions (GW501516, EPO, and HGH), now boxed on four occasions, with each of those four fights gradually increasing in both prominence and purse. His latest fight, for example, is a relatively big one against Andy Ruiz in Los Angeles on a card funded by Riyadh Season; meaning Miller will be paid handsomely just for showing up. Even his last fight, a 10th-round stoppage loss against Daniel Dubois, was a lucrative outing for Miller, with it again taking place on a show funded by men in the Middle East. 

This, as a career trajectory, flies in the face of the idea that cheaters never prosper and Miller, if anything, now stands as proof that in boxing the opposite is true. Indeed, by still competing, Miller perhaps demonstrates that there is nothing more marketable than notoriety and that even black marks can be scrubbed or, better yet, used as a selling point. 

This was evident earlier this week, in fact, when Miller was pictured enjoying a tactile moment with promoter Eddie Hearn, someone who famously – and quite rightly – castigated Miller for failing PED tests in the lead up to a 2019 fight against Anthony Joshua. Not content with that, Hearn, when asked, even went on record claiming he would never work again with Miller as a matter of principle. 

Yet now, although not directly involved with the American, it would appear as though time has healed all wounds and that there is no greater solder than Middle East money. If in any doubt, look at how many supposedly toxic relationships in boxing have been sorted in recent times; look at how many cheeks are turned; look at how many hands have been held. Not just a man with limitless wealth, Turki Alalshikh, he of the magic touch, is seemingly also the world’s leading relationship counsellor, fixing, for better or worse, every bridge we were led to believe was either burnt or broken in our sport. 

In the case of Miller and Hearn, the unlikely union is less problematic than it is disappointing. We can see why it has happened, of course, and why Miller has been forgiven by so many, but that doesn’t make it right, nor does it make it any easier to watch Miller perform in the ring and pretend everything is okay again. 

Because, really, it isn’t. It is difficult to watch him objectively – that is, through a lens that isn’t smudged – and it is difficult, furthermore, to stomach the silence of others when watching him perform on fight night. Promoters, commentators, pundits, journalists, they are all as guilty as each other, and yet, in the end, what is the alternative to this collective indifference? Allowed to box, it is surely only right that we now treat Miller the same as everyone else; the same as all the other boxers who are allowed to box in 2024. Checkered history or not, no good can come from dragging up the past, they say, irrespective of how relevant and important the dragging up of the past may be to what is happening now, today. 

Certainly, with Jarrell Miller, you can argue that his PED issue is more relevant than anything else he brings to the ring in 2024. It is more relevant than titles won, opponents defeated, and any pre-fight sound bites or goals, that’s for sure. It is also something that should be mentioned in every fight preview and indeed report, no matter the result, and something that should, in a world more ideal than this, be announced by the master of ceremonies during the pre-fight introductions. 

Alas, that is probably too much to ask. 

Still, if the entire boxing world can manage to reach for their phones and tell you what they think of Imane Khelif on a Thursday afternoon, one can only hope that a similar outrage – or even just scrutiny – provides the soundtrack to Miller’s fight with Ruiz this weekend in LA. That is the least a boxer in Miller’s position deserves given the speed with which he has returned to the ring and how welcomed and rewarded he has been upon his return. It feels wrong somehow for him to now flourish – even if it’s just financially – without any kind of backlash, or simply a reminder at every turn of what he has done.

Rather than cruel, such reminders can be viewed as crucial, cautionary, if only to maintain an awareness and provide others with some sort of deterrent if they should have Milleresque thoughts during training camp. After all, in a world where perception is everything, if we can’t rely on the authorities to adequately punish drug cheats in this most dangerous of sports, we can at the very least invest in and place value on the besmirching of reputations.

“It’s interesting,” Miller’s promoter Dmitry Salita told me last year, “because Jarrell is very marketable and fans will tune in to watch him fight. But he is still paying the price for what he did and it seems to be that some of the people in position to give him opportunities are not willing to do so. 

“My opinion, though, is this: if you do the crime, you do the time. He did the time and it was a significant portion of his career. It’s been more than four years now since that (the failed test) happened, so that’s a lot of time. He wants to make it up to his family and he wants to realise his talent. I feel like once someone fails a test he should be suspended. But then once he is free, he has to be allowed to pursue every possible opportunity. If Anthony Joshua’s team says, ‘Oh no, he’s a former drug cheat, we’re not going to fight him,’ that doesn’t make any sense right now.”

Tough though that is to hear, and stomach, Salita is absolutely right. If boxing, as a sport, is going to dish out temporary bans for failed drug tests, however tough or lenient, we must learn to later accept tarnished boxers back into the fold once these bans have been served. Whether at that point we are capable of forgiving them or supporting them is another matter, but surely, if cleared to fight, you must also be allowed to fight. It is then up to the boxer to secure his own redemption and forgiveness, perhaps even from those closest to them.

“Based on what he tells me, and from what I’ve seen, he feels very remorseful about what happened,” Salita said. “We all make mistakes and hopefully we learn from them and it never happens again. That’s our collective goal here.”

On Saturday, both Miller and Khelif return to the ring. Miller, as mentioned, will box Andy Ruiz, the heavyweight who famously capitalised on Miller’s dishonesty in 2019 to stun Anthony Joshua, while Khelif will box Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori in the quarter-final of the Olympic Games. There will, in both these fights, be allusions to controversy and asterisks, yet only one of the two incidents will take the world by storm and receive the attention and unsolicited opinions of politicians, celebrities and influencers alike.

Why that is, one can only speculate. Certainly, though, the popularity and prestige of the Olympic Games has much to do with it, as does the format of an amateur bout; short, easy to watch, digest, and then later clip for social media. The image itself, too, that of Khelif towering over an opponent and throwing punches with muscular arms, is catnip for those fixing for a gender debate and, moreover, to pair this image with one of an Italian woman, Angela Carini, cowering, quitting and crying after receiving two of these punches served to create, on Thursday (August 1), the perfect storm. Now, whether right or wrong, Khelif, this “monster” who has been defeated by other women in the past, will be followed by controversy and hate wherever she goes. 

Miller, in contrast, has outlasted his scrutiny. Perhaps because a drug cheat in pro boxing looks no different than their opponent – in itself a telling statement – Miller is, in the eyes of the uneducated masses, just another heavyweight boxer with a big punch and a big gut. He is not someone whose image stands out on a never-ending social media feed, nor are there any clips of him “elevated” and beating up an opponent so badly the opponent turned around and refused to carry on. Instead, Miller is, in a sport of smoke and mirrors, able to hide in plain sight, his mistakes deemed common, forgivable, our little secret.