Of all the bizarre and shocking things Ryan Garcia did before, during and after his fight with Devin Haney last month, perhaps the least bizarre and shocking was the meeting he arranged with former US President Donald Trump during his post-fight victory lap.
It’s a natural meeting of the minds. This connection came before news broke that Garcia had failed a pre-fight performance-enhancing test for ostarine and was intended, in a sense, to highlight just how celebrated Garcia, the newest so-called face of boxing, has become. What we didn’t know was that there were even more twists to Ryan Garcia’s story.
Now, a few weeks later, we see this Trump meeting not only as a unification of self-interested people, but also as speaking more about what these two men represent. Both chronic tweeters have used social media as a storytelling tool at various times, likely in hopes that their version of a particular story will stick and not be trumped by something as inconvenient to them as facts, truth, or evidence. For Trump, his embrace of the post-truth world took place on the grandest stage of all, while for Garcia, who had similar proclivities, his attempt to control the narrative took place on a much smaller scale but was no less disturbing and fascinating to witness.
It all started with the elderly conspiracy approach. Meaning: Garcia, a sensitive, cocooned 25-year-old, was surrounded by many like-minded people with a penchant for distrust of authority, a desire to stick it to a man and a tendency to say at every turn, “Makes you think, doesn’t it?” By joining this lovable, motley crew, Garcia has managed to create a ready army of online followers, disciples, people who will stick with him through hefty and gaunt and challenge the powers that be if those powers ever try to mess with him or undermine his achievements.
When this inevitably occurred after the Haney fight, Garcia, as planned, prepared his army to defend his right to a fair trial. Moreover, Garcia, because of his openness on social media and how open he was with his presence on social media, was already prepared to fight in his own corner, scream louder than anyone else and proclaim his innocence in his own unique way. and a slightly jarring style.
He was also helped by the constant willingness of people reporting his failed tests – one on April 19 and another on April 20 – to inform people on social media and thus connect with both Garcia’s supporters and, at times, Garcia himself. It doesn’t really benefit anyone, especially when a lawsuit is involved. It also did no one any good to speculate that, in addition to being flagged for ostarine, one of Garcia’s tests also detected traces of 19-norandrosterone, a banned steroid, requiring further testing. Finally, when it was announced on May 8 that there was in fact no second drug, 19-norandrosterone, history was rewritten as a “victory” for Garcia, and Garcia himself was ecstatic to take this development and spin it as History. Like any boxer in trouble, the Californian was ready to pounce on a mistake or technicality like a housewife would pounce on a stain. Therefore, once he received it, he quickly informed all his followers that he had been “cleared” of all wrongdoing.
Ryan Garcia (Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Empire State Realty Trust)
Of course, this wasn’t entirely true. It’s true that he was reportedly cleared of using this particular drug, 19-norandrosterone, but that still doesn’t explain the presence of ostarine in Garcia’s system (at a concentration of 6 ng/ml about 60 times the Novel York State legal limit). Athletic Commission), nor does anything to clear the massive cloud that still hangs over him.
Ideally, all of this would have been handled better, both by testers and the media, and we were spared the detailed description of the procedure. But unfortunately, this is where we find ourselves in the year 2024, where everything is open to interpretation and someone is always trying to spin rumors or simply bend the narrative to their own point of view. In the context of PEDs in boxing, we have seen the prevalence of this type of behavior recently, especially in the cases of Conor Benn and Alycia Baumgardner, who both used social media to convince themselves or others of their innocence, often without any real basis. It seemed that, frightened by silence or the belief that silence was a sign of guilt, both Benn and Baumgardner began to act, more actively than ever, and decided that it was enough to say they were innocent rather than wait for the official trials to take place.
For some people this was actually enough. If, for example, you liked a boxer or needed one for a fight, a declaration of innocence coupled with a poorly written statement and a basic motivational quote was enough to make your cheeks turn and there was nothing more to say. However, by giving boxers this degree of power, you can’t lend a hand but wonder what the future holds when it comes to PEDs in sports.
If you ask me, the B sample is to blame. Not Ryan Garcia’s B sample (which today confirmed what we already knew). This is not Conor Benn’s B-sample. It’s not even a B sample of any particular boxer. I mean sample B as a concept; sample B as an open door and a talking point, and an opportunity for busy journalists and others who benefit from boxing’s presence in the news to sensationalize and drag these issues.
Ultimately, for sample B, it’s just a MacGuffin. This seems critical, but ultimately means very little. It’s just a distraction, a distraction, a nuisance. It gives boxers, once caught, the opportunity to buy time, gain support, distort the narrative and demand something underhanded, which in turn makes a complete mockery of total accountability. Moreover, the B-sample culture, the soap opera currently being played out in public, has rendered boxers “innocent” unless it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they knowingly took a performance-enhancing drug or – in what would be a world-first – actually held up their hands and admitted to his transgression.
This, in a sport that is already too unruly, ambiguous and hazardous, will never be good.
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