Former 154lbs champion and recent super-middleweight title challenger Jaime Munguia’s positive test for exogenous testosterone raises the sport’s nagging question: How prominent is PED use in the already violent sport?

Mexico’s Munguia popped positive in a urine test collected by the Nevada-based Voluntary Anti-Doping Association following his rematch victory over France’s Bruno Surace, who knocked out Munguia in his hometown of Tijuana in December.

“I went to Mexico and knocked out Munguía fair and square in December and I was gracious enough to give him a rematch in May,” Surace said in published reports. “He knew he could not beat me on a level playing field. I trust that this result will be overturned immediately.”

Munguia responded to the test result by issuing a three-paragraph statement: “Throughout my boxing career, I have undergone numerous anti-doping tests and have never tested positive. I was tested twice during this training camp, and both results came back negative, which is why receiving this notification of an adverse finding has been a complete surprise to me.

“Several experts have explained that there are multiple ways contamination can occur, and I am fully willing to undergo any retroactive, current or future testing to demonstrate that I have always been a clean athlete.”

On ProBox TV’s “BoxingScene Today”, former 140lbs champion Chris Algieri said it’s “really surprising” that a urine test would nab Munguia.

“That’s amateur hour if you’re trying to cheat tests,” Algieri said. “It leads me to believe it’s accidental contamination, because to have it show up in this manner, it just doesn’t make sense.”

Yet, former welterweight champion Paulie Malignaggi reminded that Munguia trained this past camp with the trainer of four-division champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, who tested positive for the banned PED Clenbuterol before his 2018 rematch with Gennadiy Golovkin and blamed it on ingesting tainted beef in Mexico.

“[Munguia] had just got with Canelo ‘Mexican Meat’ Alvarez’s team. If it was a team thing, you’d think they’d be smarter. He may have gone outside the team. There’s a lot of stupidity in boxing. He’s not the first to fail [a urine test].”

Adding Munguia to a list of positive-tested fighters that counts Alvarez and Ryan Garcia to a climate where there’s “not strong testing” leads Malignaggi to conclude that boxing is plagued by PED use.

“It’s looked at as pretty common … most are doping,” alleged Malignaggi.

A part of Malignaggi admits he’s resigned to the plight.

“No one wants to fix this. Even the guys who want to be clean, is it right to send yourself into a coma?” he asked.

When Algieri spoke of being encouraged to take PEDs late in his career to ensure the greater pay days attached to greater name recognition, Malignaggi expressed no such temptation, saying those who’d choose to cheat have “no morals, no ethics … you’re a piece of shit when you can be bought.”

Munguia, at 28, desperately needed a victory over Surace in the rematch after getting decked in the 2024 upset of the year. He won the May 3 rematch in Saudi Arabia by unanimous-decision scores of 117-111, 116-112, 117-111, and is the No. 2-ranked super-middleweight, according to Mexico-based WBC.

“Whenever someone pops, I’m not surprised,” Algieri said. “Guys are on stuff.”

Malignaggi and host Jimmy Smith likened boxing at its elite level to cycling, where fighters invest several years of their life to establish their skill and then confront a climate where training-camp recovery is at a premium.

Those doping “can do three- or four-a-days [workouts] because of the recovery [benefit of testosterone],” while Algieri said cheating gives the fighter the ability to work out all week long and continually “show up for every session fresh as a daisy.”

The human body with no assistance is not up to such demands, Malignaggi said.

That brought Smith to ask if boxing is a dirty sport.

“These [clean] guys are never going to win because you can’t match the [workout] numbers,” Malignaggi said. “It makes your chin stronger, helps you make weight, allows you to run farther. At the world-class level, the differences are minimal.”

Thus, the temptation to embrace an edge.

“If I can put it in my arm, literally everything is better in boxing,” Algieri said.