BANGKOK, Thailand – Any well-trained boxer will tell you that, come fight night, the hard work has already been done. The contest, for however long it lasts, should be easy by comparison to the weeks and months of grind in the gym. Yet the perception remains that it’s what happens in the ring which is the exclusive cause of damage or injury.

Often, however, the fight is merely the final blow. The real punishment, the kind that wrecks the brain, has been building long before the opening bell sounds. 

“We have found that most fatalities that occur in the ring could have been prevented because they are a direct result of either being knocked out in sparring or an accident suffered in everyday life,” said WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman. 

At the WBC Convention he has therefore imposed a rule that every knockout that occurs in the gym during a sparring session must be reported to both the organisation and relevant athletic commissions.

Which is all well and good on the surface. But surely impossible to police.

“A boxer will do whatever they have to do to box,” said Dr Neil Scott about monitoring what occurs behind the closed doors of a boxing gym. “There are numerous examples of boxers holding back crucial information – like epilepsy; ongoing headaches – and they then succumb to ‘second impact syndrome’ inside the ring.”

Second impact syndrome should be self-explanatory. Damage is caused by the first impact, often without real detection, leaving the brain susceptible to deterioration when the second impact occurs. 

Scientific studies have compared the force of a punch from a trained boxer – which is 52-times the force of gravity – to being hit at full pelt by a 13lbs bowling ball. When one then considers the number of punches we get to see in a fight, and the countless more that we don’t during training camp, it should be terrifying levels of punishment.

For context, Canadian cruiserweight contender Ryan Rozicki divulged the amount that he will spar before a fight. “It really depends on the fight and the notice but, for my last fight [a 12-round draw with Yamil Peralta in 2024], I did eight-to-10 rounds, three times a week,” he said. The 30-year-old’s camp lasted eight weeks – meaning he engaged in up to 240 rounds of sparring. He’s had 22 fights. Should he have prepared in the same way for each bout, that’s more than 5,000 rounds of sparring – and that’s before we get into the mathematics of his amateur career. It shouldn’t be a stretch, then, to estimate how many rounds of sparring a more experienced competitor will have engaged in.

“Kind of makes me glad I’m not good at maths,” Rozicki joked.

But his attitude is commonplace. Expecting the boxer to admit to being hurt in training is unrealistic for several reasons but the biggest, and most obvious, is the consequences to their livelihood. A reputable coach told BoxingScene that one of his fighters, a world-class contender, knocked out four different sparring partners in one week; three of whom went on to have professional contests within a fortnight of waking up. Had they, or their teams, divulged the finer details of those sparring sessions, nobody would have been paid.

“Yes, we can ask boxers to tell us the truth,” Scott continued. “But there are human factors to consider: people will lie. The biggest problem is that boxers want to spar, they will travel to spar, they will spar to further their education, plenty earn from sparring. It is totally unrealistic to regulate every gym.”

This, of course, is true. It is what makes the issue of sparring so troubling: simply, it occurs in countless gyms all over the world, every single day, and it is completely unregulated. Asking questions about what goes on in a gym is difficult enough, but to expect honest answers is naïve in the extreme. 

“People from all walks of life tell lies but boxers tell lies habitually,” said the British Boxing Board of Control’s Robert Smith. “You can make the questioning as regular or as extensive as you like but you can do nothing whatsoever to ensure that what comes back is the truth. We’ve had boxers who we later discover to have suffered an injury but we’d be the last person they would tell because they know that we will cancel the fight.”

South Africa’s Dr Peter Ngatane agreed. “Before they answer the question they will consider what is the right answer and what is the guilty answer,” he said. “The guilty answer will lead to them being pulled out of the fight, so they will give the right answer – the one that ensures they fight and they get paid… Eighty per cent, maybe even 100 per cent, of injuries are due to sparring.”

Ngatane told the story of a boxer who worked by day as an electrician and fell off a ladder, hitting their head in the process, in the days leading up to the fight. When the second impact was administered by his opponent, he did not regain consciousness after being knocked out.

There is also a boxer’s pride to consider. Fuelled by the perception of appearing invincible, expecting them to divulge any hurt they endured during sparring – or even after falling from a ladder – goes against the warrior code they all live by. 

In September 2016, Scottish boxer Mike Towell went into his bout with Dale Evans after suffering from chronic headaches for weeks. Yet he felt he couldn’t tell anyone about the extent of them because he knew that his pay-packet would be taken away. Towell, like all fighters, did not consider the worst-case scenario. He was stopped in five rounds and died the following day. Eight months before that, Nick Blackwell was thumped into a coma by Chris Eubank Jnr. Upon recovering he admitted the real damage likely occurred during some fierce sparring during his preparation. Undeterred, Blackwell – despite being told he could not box again – arranged some secret sparring to feed his desire for combat. It ended with him in hospital, his brain forever ruined. 

“We do not have proper protocols for sparring,” said Dr Ricardo Monreal. “Most sparring doesn’t have any scientific analysis. For sparring to be ‘safe’, it demands everyone’s involvement: fighters; managers; trainers; promoters; commissioners… That’s why logs for every sparring session must be carried out with minutes, weights, accidents, everything recorded.”

Monreal, from Mexico, described the combination of sparring alongside boxing’s other secret killer – boiling the body to make weight – as a “mortal cocktail”. And it’s one that thousands of unsuspecting professional boxers will continue to drink by the bucketload.