Boxing world is in shock

Mike Tyson, former world heavyweight champion, is to make a comeback – as a woman.

He has begun to train for the 2028 Olympics, where he plans to compete as a superheavyweight. “I’s the baddest woman on the planet, see,” he told me in an exclusive interview.

Mr – or rather Miss – Tyson specified he isn’t coming back for the money or fame. It’s just that she feels her CV is incomplete. Although, fighting as a man, she won WBC, WBA and IBF titles, she never triumphed at the Games.

Mike, or rather Mirabel as she now calls herself, will be 62 when the next Olympic Games come along, but she doesn’t see that as an obstacle. “I be young enough to kick any bitch’s ass,” he said.

But the real story unfolded when I asked Mirabel since when she had seen herself as a woman. “Since I was born, man,” she replied.

True enough, many observers have remarked on Tyson’s high-pitched voice that indeed sounds more feminine than masculine. That voice, explained Mirabel, belonged to the woman trapped in a man’s body.

Why then has she had to wait so long to come out? Mirabel explained that it was as a boy named Mike that she had been incarcerated 38 times before she was 13. “You try telling those bad mofos at the juvy you’s really a girl,” she said. “They do you in turn and then you get the shank.”

As was inevitable, the issue of chromosomes came up, and Mirabel had a ready answer. “Ain’t about no chromosomes, man,” she said in her mellifluous tremolo. “Is about how you feel, see. And I feel like, well, you know, giving’em bitches the old one-two.”

In addition to filling that lamentable gap in her boxing record, Mirabel acknowledged that the idea of violence towards women had always held certain attractions for her. “Now I ain’t got to marry them bitches to punch their lights out,” she explained.

When I reached the IOC to get their take on the story, they commented that, apart from Tyson having lived the first 58 years of his life as a man, there are issues with his eligibility, as a professional, to fight in an amateur event.

“Ain’t no problem,” insisted Mirabel. “That license, it be given to Mike, not Mirabel. And it lapsed anyway. Ain’t no longer valid, see.”

The interview then turned informal, we cracked a bottle of the Olympic spirit and had a few shots to toast Mirabel’s new career. As the evening progressed, she was getting a bit amorous and I decided to beat my retreat. We parted as just friends.

Welcome back, Mike – sorry, Mirabel. Olympic boxing needs you. Pierre Coubertin is smiling at you from wherever he is.