EXCLUSIVE: ‘They doped me’ – Ngannou on Joshua loss

Francis Ngannou believes he was drugged to ensure he was defeated by Anthony Joshua when the pair fought in March, 2024.

‘I was set up,’ the former UFC champion tells me matter-of-factly. ‘This is not the thing that people like you to say in public. But I just don’t care. I say what I think. I think this wasn’t fair at all. Nothing here was fair’.

Ngannou claims he first noticed funny business occurring in the week of the fight, when he says he was repeatedly told by joint promoters Matchroom Boxing and Queensberry Promotions to arrive at promotional events hours before they actually began.

‘This was stressful and tiring,’ he says. ‘This was just the beginning of the week. I didn’t know how deep the situation was’.

On fight night itself, he explains, he was informed he would be picked up from his hotel at 10:30pm and transported to the Kingdom Arena, where the fight would take place between midnight and 1am, just as he had been told it would two months previously.

He says: ‘We get in the arena at 10:45pm, and I remember this producer came and told us: “We are having a little delay on the broadcast. So you’re going to be fighting around 1:45am.”’

Ngannou says he was frustrated, not least because his training had been predicated on fighting at midnight, but nevertheless waited in his locker room. ‘I was getting tired. Sitting there, drinking, waiting.’ He adds he started to feel extremely sleepy, despite trying to warm up vigorously. ‘Everything was off. I was in the locker room, warming up, sweating, sitting down, falling asleep while sweating’.

At 1:30am, he says he watched on a television screen as Anthony Joshua arrived at the venue. ‘That’s when we started to be like, ok, something is off. He can’t be coming now if he was getting ready to fight at 1am or 1:45am, as they’d previously said’. As it was, Ngannou points out the walk to the ring didn’t start until 3:30am, and the fight didn’t commence until close to 4am.

After being knocked to the ground in the first round, Ngannou was brutally punched unconscious by Joshua in the second. He says from the start of the contest he felt so strange that he believes – although he has no proof – he was drugged with something in the water in his locker room.

He says from the first bell he was not able to see well, nor to measure distance. He explains he was amazed he was knocked down in the first round as the punch hadn’t felt hard, and had caught his own glove before making contact with his face.

‘The first knockdown, I get surprised, because I was on the ground. I was like, what the fuck is this? I mean I felt the punch, but honestly it’s not what really got me down.’ He adds he has taken much harder punches over the course of his career and never been knocked down.

When his coaches were talking to him between rounds, he says ‘their voices started sounding far away. I just heard them from a very far distance. I’m looking at them and seeing them close, but their voices are coming from miles away’.

He says he doesn’t remember the second round at all.

If he could rewind time, would he drink the water in the locker room again? His answer is unequivocal: ‘Absolutely not… Not only I will not drink the water, I might not even buy the water in the city’. He says he now thinks drinking the water was an error caused by his lack of boxing experience.

‘The water was there. They put the water there. I know, big mistake. I see a lot of boxers that say: “Oh no, we don't drink water from the locker room. We bring our own water”. [They’re] not even fighters at the top level. They were like: “No, we don't drink it, bro.”

Why does he think the boxers he spoke to don’t drink the water provided in a locker room before a fight? Ngannou says: ‘Because they are suspicious, because something can happen. The reason they don't drink water is the exact same reason why I shouldn't be drinking that water. When you're in the locker room for over four hours, and there is somebody over there to collect urine, it's obvious that you're going to drink water over and over and over, you know? Or maybe at some point you start a warm up, because you think you're going to fight at 1:45am. Yeah, you're sweaty. You drink water. You take a sip every single time… We were just exposed, like amateurs. I didn't know the degree of how nasty boxing can be’.

Ngannou says it wasn’t until three days after the fight that it occurred to him it was ‘obvious’ he had been the victim of foul play, and that he now partially blames himself for being too naïve.

Ngannou’s bout against Joshua was only his second professional boxing match. His first, four months previously, was an astonishing contest against reigning heavyweight champion Tyson Fury that Ngannou had appeared to win comfortably – although the judges controversially awarded victory to Fury.

Ngannou says: ‘The first fight, the Tyson Fury fight, I think I offended a lot of people, and they wanted to restore that… I think what they were saying at the time, even before the fight, was that it was the Anthony Joshua versus Tyson Fury fight that they wanted to set up. So me winning the fight [against Joshua] would spoil that fight… What was at stake was so big. That's why sometimes I'm like, ok, this is also my fault. I should have understood what was at stake…

‘I did a lot of damage with the Tyson Fury fight, business-wise. They wouldn't let that continue… Let's not be stupid. You don't come from MMA, and you have no organisation behind you, and then you come and meet this structured organisation that everybody is sitting inside, and then you just destroy like that. It’s a money machine for many people. They've been around, they eat from that. You cannot just come and disrupt the system like that… If they had known that this fight could go this way, it would have never happened’.

For a man who believes he has been cheated on such a grand scale, Ngannou seems remarkably lacking in bitterness. He says if he fights at the elite level of boxing again, he will get involved in every detail. ‘We're going to put everything right,’ he says. ‘The fight time, for example. The pick-up time… We both would arrive at the same time everywhere. Period. If I'm going to wait three hours because there is a delay of operation, then, yes, we both arrive three hours ahead. It's ok. Don't play me and make me arrive three hours early and somebody else only one hour…

‘Maybe I look very stupid. Maybe when I people look at me, they're just like: “oh, this stupid guy. He knows nothing, right?”’

He points out, however, that so far he has got everything he wants, and that he intends to carry on doing so. ‘I’m not stupid’, he says. His track record shows he’s a quick learner. Perhaps it’s time the world stopped underestimating Francis Ngannou.

Matchroom Boxing and Queensberry Promotions were approached for comment. At the time of publication, neither had responded.