“I can’t fail,” Anthony Joshua says quietly when asked if he feels under intense pressure to perform with explosive force against Robert Helenius on Saturday night in London. The former world heavyweight champion looks up and repeats those words before trying to add a positive gloss to his unenviable situation. “I can’t fail. That’s good pressure. Fight hard and win.”
His 6ft 9in opponent from Finland has been drafted in as a late replacement, having had only a week to prepare for the bout after Dillian Whyte failed a drugs test. Helenius is given little chance outside his own camp but Joshua is trying to rebuild his career after a difficult period in which he lost his world heavyweight titles to Oleksandr Usyk, who then beat him again in their rematch last August.
Joshua is expected to dispatch Helenius and then fight Deontay Wilder, the American who hits harder than anyone else in boxing, early next year. A bout with Whyte was meant to be a decent test and a way to shake off the uncertainty surrounding Joshua’s long-term future in boxing. But he now knows that the outcome of his hastily arranged bout will be compared with the way Wilder knocked out Helenius in the first round last October.
The 39-year-old Finn is a more credible opponent than his crushing defeat to Wilder would indicate and Joshua initially told his promoter Eddie Hearn that he was reluctant to face Helenius. There is no doubt that Joshua expects to win but he was not keen on producing an unimpressive contrast to Wilder’s demolition work.
“There’re always going to be comparisons,” he says now, “but this is my fight with Helenius. Not Wilder’s fight, or anyone else’s fight. It’s just me and him.”
He also has a sensible strategy when disregarding speculation about his fight with Wilder. “Ignore it,” he says. “One step at a time.”
In answer to those who expect him to walk through Helenius, who is in good shape after winning a fight in Finland on a third-round stoppage last Saturday, Joshua says: “It’s the wrong mindset with Helenius. He is going to roll the dice. What’s he got to lose? It’s going to be a good fight but I want to take him out in round one if I can. I need to take him out. Helenius has got to worry about me, and I’ve got to worry about myself.”
Joshua remains as amiable as ever but there is something poignant about his place in boxing. He was once a wildly popular world champion who dragged boxing into the mainstream while becoming a corporate giant who made hundreds of millions of pounds. Joshua is still outrageously wealthy but three defeats – with the first coming in a shock defeat to an apparent no-hoper in a roly-poly Andy Ruiz Jr who dropped and stopped him in June 2019 – have dulled his sheen.
An embarrassing monologue in the ring after he lost for a second time to Usyk suggested that the seamless AJ Show had been reduced to tatters. Joshua then made a mediocre return four months ago with a stilted victory over Jermaine Franklin. At the age of 33, the adulation he enjoyed since winning Olympic gold in 2012 has faded.
“I was champion then,” he says of his peak years. “I think when you’re champion [the acclaim] is deserved. I’m not champion any more, so it’s natural. Even when I became world champion the two fights after that I wasn’t in a stadium. It was only when I fought an old-school legend [in Wladimir Klitschko at Wembley Stadium in April 2017] that I really had my crossover.”
Joshua had four more stadium fights, while also boxing at Madison Square Garden, but now, he concedes, “I’m not champ so it’s back to the O2 [for Franklin and now Helenius]. Once I fight the right people we could easily go back to a stadium. Everyone loves a winner. Losers, especially in boxing, get no credibility.”
He believes he can regain some of his lost lustre “if I win the world championship. That’s what it comes down to. I never looked at it like: ‘Oh, they love me.’ No, they just love the belts. That’s why I didn’t really buy into the hype because they don’t love you. Whoever has the belts will be king. At the minute I don’t have a belt so I understand why there is a shift in my reality.”
Joshua insists that his identity is not rooted solely in boxing and that his wider success means he can survive the loss of his champion’s glitter. “We spent a lot of time [earlier in his career] looking at the industry outside boxing and how to tap into a mainstream market. So I never let boxing be the ruler. I worked extremely hard outside boxing to build my brand. So that was part of my plan in the long run because I’ve always believed it’s not just about boxing. I can’t let boxing define me. There’s got to be more to you.
“When times like this, low times, do happen, it can eat you up if that’s your whole identity. Naturally one day you’re going to fall and have to retire. You’re not champion any more. Why do people go crazy after retirement? Because they lose their identity. I thought I’ll always have my own identity as a person.”
The way in which Joshua talks about building his “brand” has been at the root of some harsh criticism. But it has allowed him to become a more rounded person and so Joshua disputes Hearn’s suggestion that he is obsessed with becoming world champion again. “I’m obsessed with the process,” he says. “That’s my real obsession because I know how tough it is to get your hands on a heavyweight championship belt. So I’m not looking past the process.”
Joshua’s belief in that process sparks an exclamation when he is asked if he will become a world champion again: “Definitely.”
Victory over Helenius will tell us nothing new about Joshua – whereas a fight against Wilder or Tyson Fury might convince him to fully explore his identity outside boxing and step away from this damaging business for ever. But, for now, he can concentrate on fighting a giant from Finland while ensuring he avoids boxing’s stark definition of failure.
