Earlier this year, Fury shared a video of himself sweating and swatting away the obvious while shirtless at a gym in Thailand. “I’m looking a little hench, chubby, and fat after reading a few comments. Welcome to my world, then. never been any different. He says it with almost a smile. The odd thing is that he is correct. The man has been told that his body is the issue for his entire career, and at some point, he stopped recoiling.
You have to go back to 2015, when he defeated Wladimir Klitschko in Düsseldorf and won three world titles on one awkward, stunning night, to fully appreciate the weight. The summit was that. What came next was a fall that is still hard to fully imagine. By the end of 2016, the training had simply stopped, he had lost his license, and his belts had been taken away. According to his own account, he was eating whatever was in front of him and drinking in bars. Although the exact numbers from that era are difficult to determine and likely always will be (the figures hover around 28 stone), the general pattern is fairly obvious. He put on a lot of weight quickly, and it had nothing to do with eating.
It’s important to state clearly that this was depression. There is no reason to doubt Fury, who has described mental health as the greatest battle of his life and the hardest opponent. Despite having everything a man should desire, he has been described as wanting to die every day. A world heavyweight champion sitting by themselves with no significance to the trophies has a subtly devastating quality. Gaining weight was a symptom, the outward manifestation of something much heavier underneath.
According to him, the pivotal moment occurred on a Halloween night in his bedroom when he sobbed, questioned what his life had become, and decided he needed to make changes. It reads like the kind of tidy story that people construct later, and perhaps it has been polished by repetition. However, the actual recovery was gradual. In 2018, he lost a significant amount of weight, started running, cleaned up, and made his way back to the ring. With good reason, the redemption arc became one of boxing’s most recurring narratives.
But this is where things start to get really interesting. Fury never lost weight. He carried a soft, heavy frame that didn’t resemble a sculpted athlete, even in his best moments, such as the 2020 demolition of Deontay Wilder, where he weighed in at 273 pounds and produced a devastating seventh-round finish. For years, fans on forums have marveled at the fact that a man of this caliber never looks the part. Perhaps that’s what everyone is missing. He has used size, leverage, and that loose, unexpected movement in his fights, all while keeping the weight under control.
Nevertheless, there is a boundary, and he has previously crossed it. He weighed significantly more than Oleksandr Usyk for the rematch in December 2024, and he was defeated for the second time in a row by the Ukrainian. It’s possible that Usyk’s skill, rather than Fury’s weight, had more to do with those defeats. It’s difficult not to wonder, though.
Naturally, he has returned now; the retirements have turned into a joke in and of themselves. When he returned in January, he claimed to be about twenty stones strong and planned to drop over a stone before engaging in combat. And he did it in April, winning his first game since 2023 with a commanding points victory over Arslanbek Makhmudov at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Nobody really knows if the body can sustain him much longer at 37 compared to the true names. There’s a feeling that he doesn’t fully understand either. However, it still feels like more than just a sport to watch him climb back through the ropes after everything that weight has meant in his life.