Just hours before that awful car crash in Nigeria, British-Nigerian heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua posted a fun little Instagram Story. It’s this 25-second video where he’s shirtless, cracking up and smacking ping pong balls back and forth with his trainer and buddy, Kevin “Latif” Ayodele. He captioned it
“@healthy_mindset dishing out table tennis smoke,”
And they’re just having a blast at some private spot in Lagos. Then it got reposted on X by @mymixtapez, and boom over 1.2 million views in no time. Now, looking back, it’s this gut-wrenching reminder of what got taken away so suddenly.
A tweet from X.
That silly game feels worlds apart from the nightmare that hit on December 29, 2025. Joshua had just come off a big knockout victory against Jake Paul in Miami on the 19th, and he was kicking back in his folks’ home country for a break. The whole thing has rattled fans here in the U.S., where his fights pull in huge pay-per-view numbers mixing that high-octane sports excitement with the gut punch of real-life tragedy.
It happened around 11 a.m. local time. Joshua was chilling in the back of a black Lexus SUV on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway near Sagamu in Ogun State. That road’s a nightmare links the crazy busy city of Lagos to the interior, but it’s packed with traffic and wrecks all the time, from what locals say. His ride was in a two-car convoy when it slammed into a truck that was just sitting there on the shoulder. Early word from Nigeria’s Federal Road Safety Corps suggests maybe they were going too fast, tried a bad pass, or had a tire blowout. They’re still digging into it, but nothing points to anything shady like foul play.
There were five guys in the SUV. Joshua got lucky walked away with some bruises and cuts, stayed awake the whole time. They got him to a top-notch hospital in Lagos for checks, and his team’s saying he’s doing fine and stable.
But man, the bad news: two of his longtime crew didn’t make it. Sina Ghami, who’d been his strength coach for more than ten years and helped start Evolve Gym in London, died right there. And Kevin “Latif” Ayodele that same friend from the ping pong clip, who’d known him since they were kids gone too. Matchroom Boxing, his promoters, put out a statement:
“With profound sadness it has been confirmed that two close friends and team members, Sina Ghami and Latif Ayodele, have tragically passed away.”
Eddie Hearn, the boss at Matchroom, chimed in:
“We are trying to contact Anthony… thankfully he appears okay from what I have seen in the images.”
Even Nigerian President Bola Tinubu gave Joshua a personal call to say sorry, pray together, and chat with his mom. And the Ogun State Governor, Dapo Abiodun, swung by the hospital himself.
The timing of that ping pong video just stings. People online are pouring out their hearts, talking about how fragile life is:
“Laughing one second, gone the next hug your loved ones.”
It’s no shock it went viral; it shows the guy behind the gloves, you know? But yeah, some wild rumors popped up, like delays in help getting there, but let’s stick to what’s real: this was just a horrible accident on the road, nothing more sinister.
Big names in U.S. boxing jumped in fast. Jake Paul, who Joshua just beat, wrote:
“Life is much more important than boxing. I am praying for the lost lives, AJ and anyone impacted.”
Folks like Chris Eubank Jr. and Hearn called Ghami and Ayodele “genuinely good men” who were key to everything Joshua achieved.
For fans stateside, Joshua’s like this cultural link. Born in England to Nigerian parents, he heads back to places like Sagamu right near the crash for family time. He even went to boarding school there as a boy. This vacation came right after that sixth-round KO on Paul, which had everyone buzzing about title fights again.
And context matters: road safety in Nigeria’s rough. The FRSC says over 5,000 people die in crashes every year, often from tires giving out or speeding. Reuters points out these highways are prone to messes because of poor upkeep and insane traffic proof that nobody’s immune, not even champs.
