The 21st of September of this year was a date boxing fans have had circled in their diaries for some time; an International Boxing Federation (IBF) Title bout between a star looking to reclaim his spot at the pinnacle of the sport in Anthony Joshua, and a fresh pretender to the claim of Heavyweight World Champion in Daniel Dubois. The fight itself was a brutal five-round affair, and while the outcome seemed fairly clear after the First Round, it made for an engaging spectacle, not least because most had predicted a close contest of a Joshua win, not the annihilation which the younger Dubois dished up.
However, I found it rather difficult to concentrate on the details of the sport after the sinister display that had preceded the fight. Even the walk-ons – which were of course the now customary tiresome, lengthy, and hubristic affairs – seemed pleasant viewing in comparison to the shameless propaganda display by Saudi Arabia.
The Gulf State’s financing of boxing has been no secret for some time now; ever since Joshua’s revenge against Andy Ruiz Jr in 2019, title fights, especially in the Heavyweight division have been moving towards that part of the world, including the Unification clash between Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury earlier this year. Most fights of this caliber are now branded as ‘Riyadh Season’, including the Joshua-Dubois fight, which, as it was held in London was rather contradictorily branded as ‘Riyadh Season: Wembley Edition’. It seems there is now no escape from the clutches of the pernicious Saudi regime for the Sport’s biggest fights.
Certainly, there was no escaping for any viewers the performance of the Saudi Anthem, with Wembley bedecked in green, and neither was there any escaping from the preposterousness of the anthem being performed for a fight between two British boxers in the British capital. The usually mind-numbing British anthem felt like extraordinary relief in the circumstances.
This is not the first time Boxing has sold out to murderers and dictators – probably the most famous fight ever, the Rumble in the Jungle between Ali and Foreman, was staged in Kinshasa, Zaire, to garner popularity for the brutal dictator Mobutu – however the sport’s often immoral and predatory business practices have never before extended to entirely selling the sport to a repressive regime.
Let us not forget that this is a regime, when it is not financing violent religious groups, and subverting Western attempts to secularize, represses women and LGBT people with impunity. This is all without mentioning the murder and dismembering of pesky journalists who don’t always say what Crown Prince bin Salman would like them to. The pathetic fawning at the feet of Turki Alalshikh, the organiser of these big fights, was utterly demoralising, as broadcasters insisted on referring to him as ‘His Excellency’, as if they were courtiers bowing before Charlemagne, not 21st Century Sports broadcasters.
The sheer hypocrisy of the regime was demonstrated beautifully by the biting political satire of Liam Gallagher, whose performance of ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’, at the event was deemed acceptable. It seems that the strange moral universe of Saudi Arabia is so cold, shallow and avaricious that it cannot even be consistent in its joyless and puritanical repression.
This has implications for sport more generally too. Golf has already effectively been bought out by Saudi Arabia with the imposition of LIVGolf on the Sport, F1 circuits are plastered with Aramco sponsorships, and FIFA are all but in the pocket of bin Salman and his vile regime too. We have already had a taste of World Cups being the plaything of backwards and repressive regimes in Russia and Qatar and it seems inevitable that Saudi will host a tournament sooner rather than later.
Sportswashing is not a new phenomenon – from the Roman Emperors deploying bread and circuses for the masses, to Hitler’s Olympics of 1936, to more recent World Cups being used as justifications for oppressive regimes, it has always been with us in one form or another – but never has sport appeared so vulnerable, and whether it is through greed, gullibility or something more intentionally evil, it seems more than willing to not only cooperate with, but also sell itself entirely to the highest bidding dictator.
“Turki Alalshikh During the soccer match” by turki-alalshikh is marked with CC0 1.0.