{"id":359063,"date":"2026-01-08T14:23:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T14:23:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/359063\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T14:23:06","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T14:23:06","slug":"frank-bruno-knows-one-opponent-was-doping-for-their-fight-its-very-scary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/359063\/","title":{"rendered":"Frank Bruno ‘knows’ one opponent was doping for their fight: “It’s very scary”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Frank Bruno firmly believes that one of his former opponents, who had the strength of a \u2018baboon\u2019, was most likely a performance-enhancing drug (PED) cheat.<\/p>\n

During his storied career, Bruno had three stabs at world honours, against Tim Witherspoon, Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis, before finally realising his ambition with a points victory over Oliver McCall in 1995.<\/a><\/p>\n

Having been stopped in his previous three attempts, it seemed that the stars finally aligned for the Londoner on that night at Wembley Stadium, London, where he convincingly dethroned McCall and claimed the WBC heavyweight title.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for him, this achievement came at a time when he had already amassed over 40 professional fights and, at the age of 33, was undoubtedly coming towards the end of his career.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, his title reign may have been extended, even if just by a couple of defences, if not for his rematch with Tyson in 1996.<\/p>\n

Their first encounter, around seven years prior, had seen \u2018Iron Mike\u2019 put on a truly destructive display to halt a brave but battered Bruno inside five rounds.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, their rematch turned out to be quite the same, only this time around, Tyson was able to get the job done inside just three, one-sided sessions.<\/a><\/p>\n

The trajectory of Bruno\u2019s story, therefore, was largely up and down, but when reflecting on his career as a whole, the former world champion suspects that he may have been at an unfair disadvantage on more than one occasion.<\/p>\n

Speaking with Clubhouse<\/a>, Bruno insists that several of his opponents were likely on PEDs, with one man, in particular, being known for his extraordinary strength.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know some people who I\u2019ve fought \u2013 I\u2019m not going to say their names \u2013 but yes, I do know some people that have definitely [taken performance-enhancing drugs].\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know the strength of a human being when you go in the ring, and when someone comes in there like a baboon \u2013 I\u2019ve now seen a baboon but this guy was very, very, very scary \u2026 I didn\u2019t know [before I got in the ring] but I had a feeling. He\u2019s a nice guy, but he\u2019s not right. He was strong. If a gorilla came in the room, it was like that sort of feeling. It\u2019s dangerous. And he got away with it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Frank Bruno firmly believes that one of his former opponents, who had the strength of a \u2018baboon\u2019, was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359064,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-359063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}