Saudi money has reshaped boxing but how do we justify the human cost?

In a defining week for Tyson Fury, Oleksandr Usyk and boxing, the glitz of a unifying world heavyweight contest sits uncomfortably against a backdrop of human rights concerns

AGENT OF CHANGE? Turki Alalshikh, Chairman of the Saudi General Authority for Entertainment with Jose Mourinho in Riyadh.

Just after five o’clock on Monday morning, at the very start of fight week in Riyadh, a beautiful and hauntingly insistent call to prayer rang out across this corner of the city. Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk may still have been asleep, allowing themselves to rest a little longer before a defining fight for the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world late on Saturday night.

It would take another seven hours for the temperature to climb to a high of 42C and so, in the calm stillness, there was time to think of more than the glory and pain of heavyweight boxing. A few days earlier I had asked Dr Saeed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi if he still carried hope that his brother Mohammad bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, a retired schoolteacher, could be saved after he had been sentenced to death for a series of seemingly innocuous posts on social media.