Ohara Davies insists his recent controversial remarks were a product of media manipulation.
The 140-pound contender from England has been widely ridiculed on social media ever since he uploaded a video a few days ago reflecting on his brutal, first-round knockout loss to Ismael Barroso last weekend in Las Vegas.
A segment of Ohara’s video drew widespread mockery from fans because it showed Davies blaming his poor performance in part due to sleep poorly the night before the fight.
The reason? Apparently it has to do with the hotel’s HVAC system.
Davies claimed that his hotel room was directly above a casino and that, as a consequence, his room was pumped up with what he referred to as excess oxygen, which disrupted his sleep. Davies asserts that the extra oxygen is used by casinos to promote gambling.
“I wasn’t sleeping that much,” Davies said on his YouTube channel. “What I realized too late was they pump extra oxygen into the atmosphere so that people can be there all day gambling and not be tired.
“In the hotel room, there were big f—— air vents. I was going to bed at 11.30 or 12 o’clock at night and getting up at 2:30 or 3 o’clock in the morning. On the Saturday, I felt physically fatigued. That was the day I’d had my worst sleep. I had my worst sleep on the Friday night after the weigh-in.”
In response to the backlash, Davies posted a video on Thursday, saying his words were “taken out of context.” Davies said his oxygen theory was simply in response to a fan’s query as to why he looked so tired in the ring on Saturday night.
“It’s gone viral,” Davies said of the clip posted by Michael Benson on X. “So, what he’s done is he’s taken a 20-minute video clip that I’ve uploaded, screen-recorded two minutes of it and put that two minutes onto his social media platforms, just taken what I said completely out of context.
“If you watch the whole video, the first thing I say is I lost the fight because I got caught with a f——- good shot. I made a mistake, I overreached with the right hand and I got countered. I couldn’t recover. It was. F—— good shot on the side of my head. I wasn’t going to recover in time. I say congratulations to Ismael Barroso. He won the fight fair and square.
“So the part where I spoke about the hotel situation, and the sleeping situation, was in response to the … people that was asking me [why] I was looking so tired during the fight.”
Sean Nam is the author of Murder on Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, the Black Mafia, and the Last Golden Age of Philadelphia Boxing