On June 21, 2025, British flyweight Galal Yafai bravely battled through 12 rounds against Mexico’s Francisco Rodriguez despite the fight being no fairer than a bullfight. He ate a vicious uppercut in round one, which wobbled him, and he was then later dropped in the twelfth, which confirmed what by that point we already knew. We knew by that point that Rodriguez was the superior fighter inside and we knew, also, that he was well on his way to winning the fight, which he did, by decision.
What we didn’t know, however, was the extent of Yafai’s handicap that night in Birmingham, nor, at the time, did we have any explanation as to why Rodriguez was able to keep going, and going, and going. Some, including Sunny Edwards, commentating for DAZN, floated a potential explanation, but, unless he had proof, that’s all it could ever be, floated. As a result, we had no option but to celebrate the performance of Rodriguez and marvel at his ability to land 575 of 1089 punches, thus setting a new CompuBox record for most punches landed in a flyweight fight. In their notes afterwards CompuBox lauded the Mexican’s effort and said: “Unreal numbers put up in this one between Francisco Rodriguez and Galal Yafai.”
Unreal, indeed. No better word could have been chosen in retrospect. They were not alone in using that word, either. Others described Rodriguez’s performance in similar terms. His work rate was unreal, they said. He was unreal. Little did they know. Little did any of us know.
In the days to follow Yafai, equally oblivious, sat with and tried to make peace with the loss. He would have heard the praise bestowed on his conqueror, the “unreal” Francisco Rodriguez, and he would have had to stomach the criticism that came his way, too. There wasn’t a lot of it, for Yafai displayed great courage that night, but there would have still been enough to sadden him. He had lost, after all. He had, by losing, surrendered the momentum that had been gathering in his career and found out some things about himself and his limitations he would have rather not known. He was then reminded of these limitations by commentators, critics and fans, all of whom had suddenly spotted flaws in his game they had failed to spot when watching Yafai beat Sunny Edwards last year.
“Even the mere act of trying to fight inside with a Mexican was to Yafai’s detriment on Saturday,” I wrote following Yafai’s loss to Rodriguez. “Brave though it was, it led only to Yafai being hurt and put in his place early and then almost stopped in the final round. In the process he was taught new angles from which to punch, new ways of throwing combinations, and the true art of finding short punches on the inside. Worse than just being outboxed, Yafai, a pressure fighter, was both beaten at his own game and shown that the game he had been previously playing was played differently in Mexico. Was it even the same game? he wondered.”
In the dark as much as Yafai, to look back on that fight report now, almost four weeks later, is to read the inane musings of the blissfully ignorant. It presents the details as we knew them at the time, and describes the action in broad strokes, but the whole story it does not tell. In fact, given what we now know about Francisco Rodriguez, everything we saw during those 12 rounds with Yafai must be recontextualized and all reports of the event, including my own, must be torn up, like love letters from a doomed and inappropriate tryst.
Forget the result, and forget the glorification of Rodriguez’s performance and those punch stats. All that needs to be recorded, vis-à-vis that fight, is the fact that 18 days after it finished we received news that Rodriguez had, according to the Voluntary Anti-Doping Agency (VADA), returned an adverse analytical finding from fight night. That, in the end, is the only detail that really matters. Combine the word “positive” with the word “heptaminol”, the drug for which he tested positive, and there you have it. You have an explanation for both Rodriguez’s “unreal” performance and the one-sided nature of his win.
Heptaminol, a stimulant, is, in addition to being used as a masking agent, known to boost an athlete’s stamina, increase blood flow to muscles and help combat fatigue and boost alertness. Essentially, it was the only word any of us needed to know on June 21. Had we been aware of it, we all would have been able to explain why Rodriguez looked so good against Yafai and saved the hyperbole for someone who actually deserved it. Moreover, those of us writing about the fight would have had a far easier time of it the following day. Just one word, that’s all it would have taken: Heptaminol.
Instead, the next day I searched for hundreds of other words only to come up with nonsense like this, blinded as I was to reality of it all: “Most observers would agree that his defeat to Rodriguez on Saturday fell into the category of ‘damaging’ and that any show of machismo, ersatz or otherwise, ultimately meant Yafai stuck around longer than was probably good for him. He gave it his all, and for that should be commended, yet at what cost? Has Yafai, by giving it his all, now been left with nothing else to give?”
Even on good days, a writer will likely cringe at whatever they wrote yesterday, but this is especially true when a subject finds new context and the writer discovers they are as ignorant as everyone else. There is, it seems, only so much insight a commentator or writer can offer when it comes to a fight and of this you are often cruelly reminded. We can all see what is going on in the ring, yet that is typically the extent of the insight. We have no idea what happened before the fight, for instance, and sometimes we don’t even get to find out what happened after.
In place of proper insight, we have only punches and hope. That’s about it. Each of us, whether writing about fights or talking about them, have at some stage had to reappraise a fight or a fighter following the revealing of information to which we were once oblivious. We also know the importance of staying somewhat ignorant ahead of fights, if only because it would otherwise be impossible for us to enjoy them. This weekend, for example, there are several fascinating world title fights taking place and these fights can only be enjoyed if we tell ourselves that the boxers involved – all of them ambitious like Francisco Rodriguez and cagey like Francisco Rodriguez – are clean, trustworthy, and playing by the rules. If we don’t turn a blind eye, it becomes harder to watch. If we acknowledge the truth, it becomes harder to swallow the lies.
As for writers, there are only so many times they can find euphemisms for the word “cheat” or veil their suspicion with a loaded and insipid description. There are only so many times they can look up the spelling of the latest performance-enhancing drug and repeatedly copy and paste this word into the body text to ensure it is spelled correctly and receives the credit it deserves. There are only so many rewrites they can do as a form of apology to the beaten boxer. There are only so many drug stories they can write until they realise that whatever they have written they have written before, with only the name and drug having changed.
