Mismatches like Garcia vs Benn do nothing for boxing – or the fighters themselves

In the city of high rollers, Conor Benn bet big on himself when he took on WBC welterwight champion Ryan Garcia in Las Vegas on Saturday night.

Five minutes after the opening bell, he left the ring devastated, his first attempt at winning a world title lasting just three minutes and 45 seconds. “Not my night, no excuses,” the 29-year-old posted on X shortly afterwards.

It offered scant entertainment for almost 19,000 people who had acquired tickets in Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena, and all those who had paid to watch on television. And it posed some searching questions for all involved.

Should Benn have been the fighter to face Garcia in a weight class he had not fought for more than four years? Why did the WBC choose to elevate him to No. 1 in their welterweight rankings? And how much of an effect Benn’s drastic weight cut — from over 160lb when he fought Chris Eubank Jr last November to 146lb at the weigh-in last Friday — had on his ability to perform on Saturday?

There was a certain irony around the build up to Saturday’s fight being dominated by talk of Benn’s weight cut, given his two fights against a weight-drained Eubank. 

Not long after Garcia’s right hand ended any hopes of Benn becoming a world champion, Eubank Jr posted his own message on X: “Welcome to the ‘fighting after cutting too much weight’ club… Enjoy.”

Eubank’s performance, particularly in their second fight, was far from his best, with many placing the blame on the extreme lengths he went to meet the middleweight limit twice in the space of seven months. Did Benn fall victim to a similar problem?

“You can’t expect to dehydrate that much and assume adding fluids back in is going to give you the same performance,” said Dr Andrew Usher, exercise physiologist and British Boxing Board of Control-licensed coach (BBBofC).

The physical impacts of dehydration are well documented. It forces the heart to work harder, compromises the ability to shift heat to the skin and affects decision making, reaction time and repeat-effort power.

“In boxing, that means a slower guard, later reaction and poorer shot selection,” said Usher. “Cutting hard also strips muscle glycogen and the water bound to it, so the fighter arrives under-fuelled as well as under-hydrated.”

Less than 12 hours after weighing in a pound below the 147lb limit at the official weigh-in on Friday, Benn posted a video showing his weight having shot up to 178lb after rehydrating and refuelling.

But this in itself is not necessarily enough. As Usher points out, weight coming back on the scale is not the same as water coming back into the tissues.

“The assumption that you undo all this (effects of dehydration) by drinking heavily and refuelling fast doesn’t hold up. The scale can’t tell absorbed water from food and fluid still sitting in the gut. Absorption is rate-limited, too: gastric emptying of water peaks at around a litre an hour so large regains over a few hours are mostly mass in transit, not restored plasma and intracellular volume.”

Usher points to studies that show across elite combat sports, around 89 per cent of athletes are still hypohydrated (having a lower than normal amount of body water) on the morning of competition. “More recovery time doesn’t fix it,” he said. “There’s a documented case of an MMA fighter who put 10.6kg (23.36lbs) back in 32 hours and competed. His kidney function and hydration markers didn’t return to normal for about two weeks.

“Cutting deep and assuming you can put it all back and be the same fighter is flawed. In Conor’s case, we never got to see what the cut would have cost him in the later rounds — the real question is what it takes out of him over a career.”

In the days leading up to the fight, Benn said making the welterweight limit for his bout with Garcia had felt like being “dragged down to the pits of hell,” as he’d endured a 15-week long diet on a daily deficit of 1,000 calories (meaning eating 1,000 calories a day less than he would to maintain his usual weight). “I’m talking to that extreme,” he told DAZN. “Messed with my hormones. Messed with my mood, emotions.”

Performance nutritionist Lee Rickards told The Athletic, it is this aspect, as opposed to dehydration, that will have been the main factor affecting Benn’s performance, saying that 15 weeks of dieting to lose muscle mass will have impacted more than Benn’s mood.

“It also reduced high intensity performance because of the lack of energy intake,” said Rickards, who has worked in boxing for 10 years, with a key part of his role being helping boxers to make weight in the “healthiest” way possible.

“Twenty-four hours of high energy doesn’t replace 10, 12 or 15 weeks of low energy, particularly carbohydrates.”

While most studies have only assessed low energy availability in acute scenarios (four to five days), Rickards said “chronic low energy availability” can contribute to many things, either in isolation or in combination with other factors. Among those effects are “impaired cognitive function and reduced aerobic and anaerobic performance, particularly the latter.”

Referring to Benn’s comments that “it had to be hard then (during camp) so it’s easy now,” Rickards said: “That’s not to say he should have dehydrated more (to make weight), he just had too much weight and muscle mass to lose.”

Benn is the man at the centre of it all, but he has been helped there by others, including WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman.

Asked what were the reasons behind elevating Benn to No.1 in the rankings in December 2025, Sulaiman told The Athletic: “The WBC and Benn continued to have close communication for all these years. The WBC received a direct petition from Benn, which was voted in favor by the WBC board of governors.”

There is, of course, controversy in Benn’s past. He failed two drugs tests for the female fertility drug clomifene in 2022, but always maintained his innocence and was cleared to continue boxing in 2024 after the UK’s National Anti-Doping Panel (NAPD) ruled it was “not comfortably satisfied” that UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) had provided enough evidence to prove a doping offence).

Sulaiman told Tris Dixon earlier this month: “We had meetings with Conor personally and the ruling from the experts proved him not guilty. He was maybe banned… or he suffered the consequences for two years. But all this time we kept close to him and he always expressed his desire to fight for the WBC welterweight title.”

Sulaiman added that Benn kept him informed of his decision to take on Eubank at a higher weight, but requested throughout that time that the WBC keep him at welterweight.

“After his last fight (against Eubank) he contacted me directly and pleaded to be named mandatory contender for the winner of Barrios-Garcia, which we did.”

Sulaiman told The Athletic the fight was a “huge promotional success and Conor made the money he had ever dreamed of making in this fight.”

It was two months after that decision from the WBC that Zuffa Boxing head Dana White persuaded Benn to leave Matchroom, who had promoted him from the start of his professional career, and sign with the new entity, which is part owned by UFC and WWE owners TKO and Sela, a Saudi Arabian entertainment, hospitality, and sports management company owned by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

Asked in the post-fight press conference on Saturday night whether he still felt Benn was worth the money, White didn’t hesitate: “Every penny.”

Having seen Benn form part of some huge stadium fights in the UK, White saw an opportunity to build him into a star name in the U.S. He took a bet that Benn’s grit and ferocity could close the skill gap to a fighter with a flawed past, including his own failed drugs tests, perhaps overlooking the fact Garcia is also a boxer with strong amateur pedigree and a professional resume way beyond the Briton’s.

Zuffa still have four fights left on their deal with Benn, which runs to 2028, with the boxer already having said he will now look to move up in weight and fight at the middlweight limit of 160lb.

Before then, he will have plenty of time to reflect on his first world title shot, and where it went so wrong.

While most won’t look beyond the man in the centre of the ring (and the brilliance of his opponent), those around the fight must surely ask whether it was in the best interests of the fighter, and the sport itself.