Jai Opetaia's Phuket Training Camp Prepares for Mikaelian Fight
Jai Opetaia has dragged the heat, hurt and hard truths of a Phuket training camp into one of boxing’s brightest spotlights. This weekend, under the lights of T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, the unbeaten Australian cruiserweight steps in with Noel Mikaelian on the co-main event of the September 21 card headlined by Ryan Garcia and Conor Benn.
It is the kind of stage he has chased for years. The kind of stage politics kept trying to take away.
Phuket, the furnace
Opetaia spent a key stretch of his camp in Thailand, working in Phuket alongside his long-time, Phuket-based Irish trainer John Hutchinson, strength and conditioning coach Mark “Macca” Mathie, and his father and trainer, Tapu “Tap” Opetaia. His younger brother Elvis joined the camp too, sharing the grind as the family closed ranks around their most important fight week in years.
By 11 a.m. on Tap’s first morning with the team, Jai had already finished his road work and was back in the gym for his second session of the day. Training in the middle of the day in Thailand is brutal. The heat doesn’t just sap your legs; it tests your resolve. The team wanted exactly that.
“You get to a certain level in boxing where it’s all mental,” Mathie said. “For Jai, it’s all mental. Our goal is to push him there.”
That became the theme of the camp. Hutchinson hammered the power work, holding the shield and demanding heavy shots. Mathie drove the conditioning. Tap slowed things down when he needed to, drilling technical corrections and forcing his son to sit down on his punches.
In one session, Opetaia completed 21 rounds on the pads with three different pad holders, four rounds with each. No shortcuts. No easy rounds. Just repetition and pressure.
The approach never really let up across the week. The body was already there. The mind was the target.
Tap sees that as his son’s greatest weapon.
“You can have all the talent in the world, be great at everything, but if your mindset doesn’t follow what your body’s doing, it’ll just fall apart,” he said. “Your mindset is 95 percent of it.
“It’s like having a nice-looking car with a bad engine in it. It looks good. It won’t go anywhere. It won’t go anywhere.”
Fighting the ring – and the system
The work in Phuket came during one of the most complicated spells of Jai Opetaia’s career. Becoming undisputed cruiserweight champion has always been one of his main goals, but the past year outside the ring has made that dream harder to reach.
In March, the IBF withdrew its sanction for his fight with Brandon Glanton once it became clear a newly created Zuffa Boxing cruiserweight title would also be on the line. Opetaia went ahead anyway and dominated, comfortably outpointing Glanton over 12 rounds. He was then stripped of his IBF belt.
The situation around the WBC has created another obstacle. The organisation had ordered Mikaelian to defend his cruiserweight title against David Benavidez in May, but Mikaelian accepted the Opetaia fight instead. Months passed without Benavidez receiving a contract, and the WBC status of Saturday’s fight remains uncertain heading into Las Vegas.
For Tap, it underlines how hard it can be for a fighter to become undisputed even when he keeps winning.
“There’s so much politics in this,” he said. “We have no control. We just do our thing, whoever they put in front of us we’ll fight.”
Losing the IBF title outside the ring has not dulled the way the family view world belts.
“No, not really,” Tap said when asked if recent events had changed how he sees them. “That’s why we started. These belts hold weight. He’s been watching it since he was a kid. I’ve been watching it since I was a kid.”
The politics did test them. Tap admits there was a moment when the frustration bit deep.
“I even said to Jai, ‘Maybe we just leave it and go, just leave it, go and do something else,’” Tap recalled. “He said, ‘Listen Dad, we won’t leave it like that just because of politics. Let’s finish what we started.’”
He is not ready to walk away from that goal. Neither is his son.
A new gym, an old fire
Part of Mikaelian’s preparation took place at Den Dungeon, Hutchinson’s recently opened gym in Phuket. Opetaia’s camp used the facility heavily, turning it into a sweatbox laboratory for a fighter who already lives on the edge.
The sessions were built to strip everything back to intent. Technical tweaks. Relentless conditioning. Pressure from all angles.
The mental side sat at the heart of it. Tap kept driving that message.
Benavidez in the distance, Mikaelian in front
One name keeps circling Opetaia’s future: David Benavidez.
During a strength and conditioning session in Phuket, Tap pulled out his phone and showed a video of Benavidez working on a heavy bag. He believes a fight between his son and Benavidez could happen next year – and that it would change everything.
“Yeah, 100 percent, that fight will skyrocket us to the next level if it happens,” Tap said. “But we have unfinished business here. Our plan is to go up to heavyweight, so we’ll move up to heavyweight and I’m sure it will be for unification, then we’ll go up to heavyweight.”
Before any move to heavyweight, before any talk of Benavidez, Jai Opetaia has Noel Mikaelian in front of him.
For all the future talk, Tap made it clear during fight week that nobody in the camp was looking beyond September 21.
“We don’t look over anyone,” he said. “Anyone we fight is dangerous.
“We go in with a plan, we tick all the boxes. Mark, the strength and conditioning coach, does his job. I do my boxing stuff.
“It’s all about respect, if anything. Respect the sport. Respect the athletes. They’re going through the same struggle, trying to feed their families.
“We concentrate on what we have to do. Then move on. Who’s next?”
