Would Holyfield be a world class heavyweight without the aid of PEDs?

They’re all on peds. You know how much money is on the line? Boxing is a big business and peds are a significant factor in how much money people investing in a boxer are going to make and a lot of these people are very greedy and smart. It’s the same with any physical type sport even if there is testing it’s very easy to pay people off and things like that. They’re using peds to the best of they’re ability, at the top of the game its huge amounts of money people get killed over that kind of money, peds is not a big deal for them.

 

Probably would’ve been stopped by Dokes. Holyfield used to get hit so much that things wouldn’t have gone well for him without PEDs.

There’s no reason he couldn’t have fought more carefully and been a solid B lister and maybe brief title holder though.

 

I don’t know that much. But steroids have been around a long time. Sports have been big business a long time and athletes have always looked for the upper hand with different performance enhancing things. I know meth was used in the 40s for athletes, something like testosterone that has been synthesized since the 1930s and is a lot healthier. They used to do things before the 1930s also.

 

Holyfield was a World Class Cruiserweight without anabolic steroids (IF he was without anabolic steroids at the time). It is wrong to judge only by appearance and muscle mass whether someone uses doping. Tour de France cyclists take steroids and look starved.
IMO the vast majority of professional boxers take steroids, and if we talk about the successful ones, then that majority is still increasing.
P.S. No one mentions that Michael Spinks gained 25lbs in the 3 months before the Holmes fight, and that case would be far more dubious.

 

He would have struggled a lot. Conjecture-wise, I don't think he was all natural before his move up, either. Technically an excellent fighter but I think he fit his frame fine around the 178lb limit he fought at when he was 22 years old.

 

Spinks didn’t gain 25 pounds. He was drying out to 175. Also, his hair didn’t fall out and he never had heart failure.

 

He always beats Tyson. Too skilled. Tyson knew it too.

 

I don’t think so, Tyson was in Jail and out of the ring for 4 years. He only had 5 or 6 rounds total in his tune up fights. Tyson was badly shot by that time.

Prime Tyson would be a totally different fight. But it would not be an easy fight for Tyson.

 

I don’t know, he may have not had the size. I’d guess he used HGH/steroids in from late 80s on and it helped him go from a champ at 190 to a really ripped HW weighing in the 210 range.

I don’t exactly think all of his competition was clean either. I’m guessing a good number of them were on some sort of PEDs. A lot of different types to choose from. It’s probably just been that way in sports for a long time.

 

no, but at the same time I would say his skill and work rate were a larger part of his success

Lewis is another one, does anyone really believe he got that huge on "home cooked Jamaican food", he weighed in at like 247, who knows how much dehydrating he did to make that he was probably closer to 260

 

Is there any reliable evidence, as to who would have been the first lineal world champion to use PEDS, Tyson for example? He

 

Ali, on the night he lost the lineal world championship to Holmes.