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
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.