Jake Paul Lends His Celebrity (Some of It) to Olympic Boxing
On one of Jake Paul’s recent Instagram stories, he voiced displeasure to his nearly 27 million followers at a decision by a set of boxing judges at the Paris Olympics. An American boxer had lost by split decision during a semifinal bout, and Paul labeled the result an “absolute robbery.”
A few slides later on Instagram, he posted a video of himself holding an Olympic medal next to a stick of deodorant from his new personal-care line.
The sequence perfectly encapsulated Paul’s partnership with U.S.A. Boxing: an unpaid, loosely defined agreement between an influencer who has disrupted the sport and a program seeking to regain its luster.
The partnership has, so far, had benefits for both parties. For Paul, 27, a YouTube star turned pro boxer, the pairing allows him to attach himself to the prestige of the Olympics and engage with them as he sees fit. U.S.A. Boxing, which is a national governing body for the sport, and the American Olympic team have access to Paul’s millions of followers.
“This is what I’ve been doing my whole life, which is storytelling and making people interested in things,” Paul said in May in an interview at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where he had come to promote a since-rescheduled fight against the boxing legend Mike Tyson. “I’m a marketer at heart, a salesman at heart. And I think I’ve brought that over into U.S.A. Boxing and just continue to shine a spotlight on them.”
The agreement resulted in an 11-minute documentary, which featured segments of Paul training with the U.S. boxing team in Colorado and snapshots of the fighters’ stories, and a couple of social media posts. The results highlight a union that had few parameters or requirements — “We’re building the plane as we’re flying the plane,” Mike McAtee, U.S.A. Boxing’s executive director, said in May — but may be the start of a long-term partnership the entities hope will be mutually beneficial.
“The sport’s going to continue to grow, and I believe I’ve already helped add to that,” Paul said.
Paul and U.S.A. Boxing announced the agreement in December, hyping it as “a first-of-its-kind partnership.” It called for Paul to mentor the boxers in marketing themselves, among other things, and he would highlight their achievements on his social platforms.
Boxing was a more highly regarded sport in the Olympics half a century ago and has featured the likes of Sugar Ray Leonard, Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. But it lost its stature around the 2000s as top prospects forwent the amateur circuit and immediately turned professional for the opportunity to earn millions of dollars. An American man has not won an Olympic gold medal in boxing since Andre Ward in 2004; Claressa Shields, a Michigan native, won back-to-back gold medals, in 2012 and 2016, in the female brackets. Only one American boxer, Omari Jones, won a medal this year.
The professional landscape is also fragmented. Bickering from rival promoters often stalls negotiations for timely fights that fans want to see. Established broadcasters associated with boxing, such as HBO and Showtime, have abandoned it, leaving the sport primarily on streaming services, like DAZN.
As its promoters continue to seek relevance and mainstream engagement, the “sweet science” has turned into a spectacle. The undefeated Mayweather and the brash Ultimate Fighting Championship fighter Conor McGregor, a star mixed martial arts athlete but novice boxer, faced off in a lucrative match in 2017, and other celebrities, internet personalities and retired athletes began entering the ring.
The environment allowed Paul and his older brother, Logan, who both became prominent as child social media influencers, to thrive as they embraced combat sports in recent years. Logan Paul boxed Mayweather in 2021 and is now a World Wrestling Entertainment figure. Jake Paul has a 10-1 record as a professional boxer since 2020 and founded a fighter promotion company with his business partner, Nakisa Bidarian. The company, Most Valuable Promotions, has raised the profile of Amanda Serrano, adding attention to sparsely publicized women’s boxing.
Paul’s involvement in boxing, though, has created enemies. He is often criticized because the bulk of his opponents are mixed martial artists, not boxers, and are past the primes of their careers. Still, McAtee said that he and other U.S.A. Boxing leaders had followed Paul’s career with interest and that the organization approached Bidarian and Paul about working together. McAtee said members of his family who had no interest in U.S.A. Boxing contacted him once the organization announced Paul’s involvement, which he said is a testament to Paul’s effect.
“People that have been in the boxing establishment may not understand it, and that’s OK, too, because everybody’s entitled to their opinions,” McAtee said of Paul’s critics. “But at the end of the day, it’s like, ‘Well, maybe they don’t like Jake Paul, but are they watching him?’”
Paul trained with the U.S. Olympic team in March in Colorado, where he led sessions for fighters in skills such as meditation and marketing. The lessons varied in simplicity from ensuring that the cellphone camera was clean before shooting video to understanding the best time to post content. While Paul was there, a camera crew collected footage for the documentary, which highlights Paul’s trip and a handful of the fighters’ back stories and has been viewed 1.5 million times. He said he would create another film after the Olympics.
“He’s highlighting amateur boxers and the work we’re putting in,” said Joshua Edwards, a boxer on the American team, said in an interview. “It feels like us amateurs are forgotten about.”
Much of Paul’s energy in recent months has gone toward training for and promoting his fight against Mike Perry, a mixed martial artist and bare-knuckle boxer he fought in July after Tyson pulled out. He is scheduled to face Tyson in November.
Compared with the activity of the rapper Flavor Flav, who drew celebrities to U.S. women’s water polo matches and posted about them daily on social media, Paul’s promotion of the U.S. boxing team during the Games was minimal. He released the documentary on his YouTube channel on July 23 and has posted about American boxers four times since then on the X platform. Paul arrived in Paris during the second week of competition, when most American boxers had already been eliminated.
After the Italian boxer Angela Carini quit her bout against the Algerian Imane Khelif, which started an uproar over Khelif’s eligibility, Paul offered Carini a spot in his promotional company to allow her “to show the world your talents on a fair platform and not against a man.” The International Olympic Committee has vehemently said that Khelif is a woman and denounced online harassment toward her. Carini has since apologized to Khelif.
Asked if Paul still stood by his online comments regarding Khelif, Bidarian said in a statement that Paul was passionate about “fairness in competition, both inside and outside the ring.”
Paul and McAtee said that they would like to continue working together for the 2028 Los Angeles Games. In the meantime, they will collaborate with Paul’s nonprofit, Boxing Bullies, which promotes self-confidence in youth, Bidarian said.
Stephen Espinoza, the former president of the Showtime Sports network, said a litany of factors outside Paul’s control had led to boxing’s current status in the Olympics and that Paul alone could not fix them. But he said that the partnership was a start.
“There’s a great benefit waiting for U.S.A. Boxing and the amateur boxers in terms of being able to potentially leverage Jake’s involvement for greater exposure,” Espinoza said. “Now the proof at this point will be in the pudding in terms of actually activating all the different mechanisms that Jake can.”
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