Time had slipped slowly into the early hours of Sunday morning and the outside temperature in Jeddah had dwindled from unbearable to sweltering.
The last of the tail lights of the cars that had brought a crowd of fewer than 10,000 fans to the King Abdullah Sports City Arena, a dome marooned alongside a football stadium in a giant parking lot in the northern suburbs, were fading away into the darkness.
The coast of the Red Sea was out there a couple of miles away but you did not need to glimpse it to know that there is a rising tide of sportswashing sweeping across Saudi Arabia, trying to rinse away its human rights abuses, and that the old prize fighting game is surfing the wave.