The Curious Case of Conor Benn's Positive Test for a Banned Substance

Backed into a corner by his own doing, Benn better come up with a counter for the inevitable questions quickly to restore his reputation in the ring.

So I have questions.

Lots of questions.

The fight between Conor Benn and Chris Eubank Jr. was officially postponed on Thursday, a day after it was revealed that Benn tested positive for a banned substance. Benn-Eubank—a family feud that dates back to the early 1990s when their fathers, Nigel Benn and Chris Eubank Sr., famously fought twice—was one of the most anticipated fights of the year. Mainstream media loved it. Tickets sold out in under an hour. Promoters giddily predicted the fight to exceed one million pay-per-view buys. 

And now it’s off.

And I have questions.

Lots of questions.

Let’s start with the timing. On Wednesday, The Daily Mail reported that Benn had tested positive for Clomifene, a female fertility drug. This wasn’t when Benn tested positive, however. That, according to Eubank’s promoter, Kalle Sauerland, happened in early September, with both sides notified shortly after and suggests that if The Daily Mail didn’t out Benn, this fight would have moved forward as scheduled.

Huh?

Mark Robinson/Matchroom Boxing

Clomifene is a performance enhancer. Period. Full stop. It’s on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s list of banned substances. Jon Jones, UFC’s former top fighter, has tested positive for it. Brock Lesnar, the ex-UFC heavyweight champion, was slapped with a one-year suspension for taking it. In women, Clomifene is a fertility treatment. It has no medical applications for men. What it can do, according to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, is alter testosterone levels. On Twitter, Victor Conte, the ex-BALCO founder, said it increases testosterone by up to 50%.

Promoters attempting to brush off a positive test isn’t new. In 2012, Danny Garcia faced Erik Morales in New York after it was revealed that Morales popped for clenbuterol. More recently, Oscar Valdez’s 130-pound title defense against Robson Conceicao went on in Arizona despite Valdez testing positive for Phentermine. Eddie Hearn, Benn’s promoter, defended the attempt to press on by saying Benn’s United Kingdom Anti-Doping (UKAD) tests were clean. And since the British Boxing Board of Control (BBBoC) recognizes UKAD and not the Voluntary Anti-Doping Agency (VADA), which detected the banned substance, the show should have been allowed to go on.

Nonsense. Or, in Hearn-speak, rubbish.

Mark Robinson/Matchroom Boxing

It should have been scrapped. It had to be scrapped. Hearn knows it. For years Hearn has railed against PED use in boxing. He has suggested that fighters who take performance enhancers should not just be banned, but imprisoned. In 2018, after Billy Joe Saunders, in the weeks before a middleweight title fight against Demetrius Andrade, tested positive for oxilofrine, a substance prohibited by VADA but not by UKAD, Hearn endorsed Massachusetts's decision not to license Saunders, saying, “What is the point of signing up for drug testing if, when you fail, everyone says, ‘Oh don’t worry about it, just let him fight’?"

The BBBoC knows—or did they? Britain’s boxing authority moved swiftly to refuse to sanction the fight, stating it was “not in the interests of boxing.” But did the BBBoC know of the positive test in September? If they did, the decision to prohibit the fight was performative, a knee-jerk reaction to getting caught by a newspaper. If they didn’t, they should be furious at event organizers for not disclosing it.

Even Benn knows. On Thursday, Eubank Jr. posted a video of Benn, back in 2019, appearing incredulous discussing Jarrell Miller’s flunked tests, failures that cost Miller a lucrative fight with Anthony Joshua. “The biggest fight of your career and you test positive for a banned substance?” Benn said. “It baffles me.” Benn, who reportedly was set to earn close to $4 million to face Eubank, now understands.

That Benn has not offered any excuses is curious, too. "I’m a clean fighter,” Benn posted on Instagram, though few believe him. That includes Chris Algieri, who Benn knocked out last December. Asked for his reaction, Algieri told Sports Illustrated, “I’m not surprised.”

“I had heard mutterings [about PED use] as I was getting ready to fight him,” Algieri told SI. “I heard mutterings during our fight week. I always give fighters the benefit of the doubt. I’m never going to mention it. I’m never going to call them out, even if I suspect it. But now that this has come to light, it makes you think. And it sucks. I don’t want to think of fighters that way. But it’s impossible not to.

“The writing has been on the wall. If you look at the way his body has changed, even from the [Adrian] Granados fight to my fight. They were only [three] months apart. The difference was visible. That’s hard to do in such a short period of time. Now you may think, ‘Well everyone’s body is different.’ But with this, it makes you rethink everything.”

Why has Benn not offered an explanation? He’s had weeks to think of one. Is it because the usual buffet of excuses—tainted meat, laced herbal tea, faulty supplement—won’t work with clomifene, a medication that, according to Conte, comes in pills?

He needs to come up with something—fast. Benn’s reputation is in tatters. The Brits, who embraced him as boxing’s next big thing, have turned on him. On Thursday, Hearn emphasized that Benn-Eubank was postponed, not cancelled, an indication that there could be a swift rescheduling. It’s unclear if the appetite for the fight will remain the same.

It's a mess. Benn’s mess. And now he has to try to clean it up. He can fall on his sword and admit he took something he shouldn’t. He can offer up a tainted fill-in-the-blank excuse and hope enough people buy it. He can say he doesn’t know and hope all of this goes away. He will face questions. Tough questions. Lots of questions. And he better have good answers.