After a pro career spanning 22 fights, Michael Conlan said his eight-round victory over Asad Asif Khan was the only one that did not have drug testing.
Conlan, who was tested through the amateurs as a two-time Olympian, however, fears that the use of PEDs is more prevalent than many in the positions of power would care to admit.
Conlan thinks he may have boxed more than one opponent who was taken enhancements, too.
The Irishman returns to action in Dublin at 3Arena on September 5, boxing Leeds, England’s Jack Bateson.
“Bar my last fight, I’ve been tested near all my fights,” said the 33-year-old. “But that’s only in the fights. That’s not through the training camp because what I see, what I think of professional boxing is a lot of people say go, because when you’re getting tested, unless you're on VADA and something or stuff like that, it’s ‘in competition.’ What’s ‘in competition?’ It’s on fight night. So if you’re taking shit [drugs] in training camp, and by the time you get to fight night and you’ve cycled it out, and then you're fighting but you’re clean on paper, you know, it’s ‘in competition.’ That shit’s out of competition. Who knows? It’s just the way it is. Anything can happen. Anything goes. Nobody really cares. Zero people care really about you but yourself and your own family. Everybody, and maybe your coach, like you’ve got good coaches, like Grant [Smith, who Conlan is with], you can tell he cares about his fighters and really wants security and safety for his fighters. And a lot of coaches are like that, obviously. But you do see a lot of coaches as well over the big names and they can make money off, they’ll jump on it. There’s people like that and they don’t really care. They just want to earn what they're going to earn.”
Asked whether he felt the use of PEDs in boxing today was commonplace, Conlan replied:
“Yeah, I think it's massive,” he said.
“I think it’s massive. I think America was much ahead. Russia, they [the Russians] always been ahead. I think the UK, in a sense, is definitely catching up and there’s people in the UK who are actively doping. I always said I would never do it because at the end of my career, whether I achieve or whether I don’t achieve, we will look in the mirror and say, ‘I’ve done it my way, I’ve done it the right way, I’ve done it clean.’ Where, as time has gone on, I think, like, these people, they’ll look in the mirror and say, ‘Fuck it, I’ve won. Everybody else was doing it.’”
“That’s what I think. I think most people at the top end in this game have done or are doing some sort of PEDs. And whether it’s legal doping or not, who knows?”
Conlan points out that even some of the most stringent testing agencies get a five-week runway with testing fighters, by which time substances would have come and gone out of their body.
Despite Conlan’s beliefs, he persists with trying to capture that elusive world title. He thought about quitting after the loss to Lopez in May 2023. Plenty felt she should have walked after losing to Jordan Gill later that year.
But the loss to Gill came while Conlan’s mind was elsewhere. He’d changed trainers, moving from Adam Booth to Pedro Diaz, and only had a short lead time to the fight.
With those factors in his mind, he did not fight for a year, but knew he would not walk away.
“After Lopez, you say things in the heat of the moment, don’t you?” he said. “Especially after losing and getting stopped, you don’t think clearly, and I was like, ‘no, that’s it.’
“That’s why, after Gill, I didn’t say nothing, because there was no point. You’ve gotta take time and reassess when you’re in a clear kind of headspace, and that was my mistake after Lopez, of saying, ‘no, that’s it, done.’ And then I’ve said, ‘no, no, I’m not done.’
“The Gill one, that was harder to swallow, 100 per cent, that was harder to swallow than Lopez, but I knew with everything in my life going on at that stage that wasn’t the best me in the ring. That wasn’t me. I shouldn’t have been in the ring with eight weeks preparation, well, six weeks of actual training, and getting in there again, someone who had something to prove with Jordan, so, you gotta give him credit, he went and got the job done that night. I lost; it is what it is.”
Like Jordan Gill, Jack Bateson has little to lose going into the lion’s den to face Conlan, but Conlan will know that – with a loss – retirement will loom larger than ever.
