Are PEDs behind Floyd Mayweather, Jr.'s defeat of "Father Time"?

When I was young, the sport of boxing still packed a wallop in the popular imagination. The heavyweight champion was the king of the sports world. Things have changed rather dramatically since then. The heavyweight division has clearly been on the decline since the early 1990s, and only a few names in lesser divisions fighting lesser opponents has sustained the sport in the popular imagination. Only one or two fights a year seem worth paying attention to. Supposedly this past fight between Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and Canelo Álvarez was one them. Mayweather was expected to win; there were only “questions” about his coming back so soon after his last fight, and the condition of a supposedly injured hand. His unbeaten opponent, Álvarez, was alleged to have a powerful punch, so anything was possible. 

Unfortunately, Álvarez was not as good as hyped, and looked completely overmatched. People marveled at the way the 36 year old Mayweather seems to have beaten the hands of time as well as his opponent. Of course, the one blemish on his resume (besides his personality), was his refusal to fight Manny Pacquiao in his prime; Mayweather claimed that he would only fight Pacquiao if he submitted to a drug test. It was a convenient excuse to duck out what would have been one of the most anticipated—and certainly most lucrative—fights in history. But it never happened. The Mayweather camp has since been the subject of a defamation law suit filed by Pacquiao, and Mayweather issued a statement stating that he never intended on “suggesting” that Pacquiao was using performance enhancing drugs. 

Having mentioned the subject of drugs, it is interesting to note that while some drug testing does occur in boxing, the results are rarely made public and even when there are positives for PED use, the perpetrators generally escape any sanction. Was PED use in evidence when Mayweather fought Álvarez? Maybe, maybe not. One thing that is certain is that the reason why the Mayweather camp withdrew its accusations against Pacquiao is because the latter’s camp wanted the evidence of Mayweather’s own positive drug tests made public. Mayweather failed at least three PED tests in recent years, after fights against Shane Mosley, Victor Ortiz and Miguel Cotto. While the USADA has come down like a sledgehammer on Lance Armstrong and various track and field athletes, it curiously found "exceptional circumstances" to ignore Mayweather's PED use, and granted him a “waiver” from sanctions. Mayweather, of course, isn’t the only boxer who has used PEDs; Evander Holyfield was accused of using them, as were Vitali Klitschko, Roy Jones, Jr., James Toney and Fernando Vargas. Mosely used PEDs to help him defeat Oscar De La Hoya.  

Other fighters have “surprised” us by fighting at the level out of their age group without resort to illegal substances. Most famously is the case of George Foreman, who came out of retirement to send the likes of Gerry Cooney back to the oblivion where he belonged. Foreman didn’t need drugs; he was just big, and he had one punch. If the Pilsbury Dough Boy had a punch, he would be George Foreman. How could you even reach any internal organs through all that flab? But Mayweather looks ripped; so do bodybuilders, and we know how they didn’t achieve their bulk just from following the instruction of a Charles Atlas guidebook, ordered from the back page of a comic book or bubble gum label.