Yeppoon is a beach town with a population of about 7,000. On Saturday, a venue built for 1,000 spectators will host a powerlifter, a CrossFit Games athlete, a rapper, a wildlife creator and a podcaster attempting to punch one another’s lights out. Welcome to Battle at Yeppoon, where global influencer boxing has acquired a Central Queensland postcode.
Fight night
Battle at Yeppoon at a glance
- Date
- Saturday 29 August 2026
- Venue
- Jabiru Events Centre, Yeppoon
- Main event
- Alex “Godly Strong” Simon vs Jordan Simi
- Co-main event
- Say True God? vs Jake Douglas
- Fight card
- 13 bouts on the latest promoted card
- Capacity
- Approximately 1,000 spectators
- Claimed reach
- More than five million combined followers
- Reported budget
- $300,000
The follower total comes from the promoters, while the budget and capacity have been reported through local media. The card may change before fight night.
The Numbers, with the fine print attached
The event runs at Jabiru Events Centre in Barmaryee on Saturday 29 August. Organisers say the card’s creators have more than five million combined followers and 6.7 million monthly views, and local reporting puts the production budget at $300,000. The latest promotion from Road to Glory Fight Nights lists 13 bouts.
KSI and the Paul brothers built modern influencer boxing around enormous online audiences and pay-per-view arenas overseas. Yeppoon is running the same basic model at regional scale: creators bring their followers, promoters manufacture the match-ups, and a local venue turns the attention into tickets and sponsorship.
The Main Event
The current headline fight is Alex “Godly Strong” Simon against Jordan Simi. Simon is a powerlifting champion with an experienced combat-sport background and roughly 278,000 Instagram followers. Simi is a podcaster, artist and online personality with about 37,000 followers, and BoxRec records exactly one professional bout on his record: a 2022 loss to former NRL player Justin Hodges. Promoters are calling this the Soreheads heavyweight title, a promotional belt, not an Australian championship.
The Fight Worth Watching for the Wrong Sport
The more interesting match-up sits one bout down the card: Say True God? against Jake Douglas.
Say True God? is a Mandandanji/Waanyi hip-hop artist from north Brisbane who won the 2026 Queensland Music Award for Hip Hop. National Indigenous Times reports he began training and running more seriously once he was confirmed as a replacement opponent, and he has described the bout as an exhibition.
Douglas is not a generic fitness influencer padding out a card. He has competed at the CrossFit Games individually in 2023 and as part of a team in 2026, finishing 10th, and he previously qualified for an Australian weightlifting team. He owns and coaches at a CrossFit affiliate and carries around 296,000 followers of his own.
Elite conditioning and strength do not automatically translate to the ring. Boxing punishes bad distance, timing and composure in ways a competition floor does not, and no amount of work capacity substitutes for actual boxing technique. There is no credible basis here for predicting how it will go. That’s what makes it so compelling. Promoters are billing it as the Soreheads cruiserweight title, another promotional belt rather than a recognised championship.
An Australia’s First?
Organisers are billing Battle at Yeppoon as “Australia’s first influencer fight night.” Yes and no. Podcast Royale already ran creator boxing cards on the Gold Coast in 2024 and again in April 2025, with reporting describing the first event as featuring popular podcasters with millions of followers between them and a fast sell-out.
Battle at Yeppoon may be the first event under that exact branding, or the first of its kind staged in regional Central Queensland. Either way, it’s a type of entertainment relatively new to Australia, let alone a Central Queensland Town.
It’s worth nothing that not too far away from Yeppon is Cracow, part-time home of Fred Brophy, an Australian tent boxing promoter who received and OAM.
Why Yeppoon?
Fight Fit Academy owner Clayton Cullen told local media that regional athletes usually have to leave home to appear on cards this size, and said the event was designed to bring attention and visitors to the town. Soreheads Promotions founder Jock Boxing argued the creators’ combined reach could benefit the region.
Those are organiser ambitions, not measured outcomes. What is true regardless is the mechanism: online reach lets a regional venue sell tickets and sponsorship far beyond its usual geographic catchment, the same trick the enormous creator-boxing event La Velada del Año has used to fill 80,000 stadiums, a feat well beyond Spain’s normal boxing audience.
Battle at Yeppoon may not be Australia’s first creator fight card, but it is a sharp example of where the format is heading. Online fame supplies the audience. Local gyms supply the ring. Fitness credentials make the outcome genuinely uncertain rather than settled in advance. And that makes it interesting. On Saturday, Yeppoon finds out whether five million followers can fill 1,000 seats.
