Canelo Alvarez landed in Riyadh on Sunday night, six days before he challenges Christian Mbilli for the WBC super middleweight title and ahead of the day the fight week schedule called for him to be there.

“Mexican champion Canelo Alvarez has arrived in Riyadh alongside world champion Oleksandr Usyk,” Turki Alalshikh posted on X in Arabic and English, with video of Alvarez walking into his hotel past dancers in traditional Mexican dress.

Usyk, the undisputed heavyweight champion, had joined Alvarez for several days of his training camp in Spain and evidently stayed on for the trip. “Oleksandr came over here for two or three days and I enjoyed it a lot. I’m grateful to train with him and I appreciate him letting me train in his gym,” Alvarez said in camp quotes released last week. “When you talk to him a little bit, you realize why he’s a champion. His mentality is everything.”

Alvarez’s early arrival answers the question he has been answering the same way since October 11, when Alalshikh posted that “Canelo reached out and told me he’ll still fight in Riyadh this October, no matter what happens.” He is there. The published fight week schedule runs from the grand arrivals through the open workouts and press conference midweek to the weigh-in Friday ahead of Saturday’s card at The Venue.

He arrived on a day Riyadh was targeted again. Coalition spokesman Maj. Gen. Turki al-Malki said forces destroyed a Houthi ballistic missile aimed at the capital Sunday morning, along with a drone in the Riyadh region and a cruise missile headed for Khamis Mushait, according to Al Jazeera. Explosions were heard in the city. The coalition later said it intercepted ten more ballistic missiles fired at the south of the kingdom, where falling debris injured two people and damaged three residential buildings and seven vehicles in Khamis Mushait and Ahad Rafidah.

It was the fifth day in a week that Riyadh itself was targeted, after interceptions Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to Kuwait Times and Arab News. No casualties have been reported in the capital.

Sunday was also the day King Khalid International Airport resumed international service, with Terminal 2 reopened for international flights and Terminal 1 for domestic, for the first time since the October 10 attack that killed 13 people and wounded more than 300. Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree responded by calling the airport “unsafe” and a “military target” and warning airlines and travelers against using it. “The Saudi regime shall bear the consequences of any operations at the airport,” he said. Lufthansa and Air France have already cancelled Riyadh service through mid-November. The State Department ordered non-emergency US government employees and their families out of Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, as BoxingInsider reported, and its travel advisory remains at Level 3, Reconsider Travel.

Alvarez flew in from Europe. The question still open is how the rest of the card gets there. Trainer Robert Garcia said Wednesday that his fighter Lindolfo Delgado, who meets Arthur Biyarslanov for the vacant IBF junior welterweight title, had no flights and no information with the grand arrivals days away. “We don’t have no flights. We don’t have no information. So honestly, I don’t really know what’s going to happen,” Garcia said, according to NY Fights. Neither Top Rank nor Riyadh Season has commented since. Dan Rafael reported that DAZN’s broadcast team is likely to call the card from a studio in London rather than ringside; DAZN has not commented.

Mbilli (29-0-1, 24 KOs), who trains in Montreal, has not yet been shown arriving. He has spent the week talking like a champion who knows the fight is being sold as someone else’s comeback. “I am world champion right now, but I have to prove that I am number one,” Mbilli said in DAZN’s behind-the-scenes camp footage, according to British Boxing News. “Many people know that the number one right now is Canelo and I have to beat Canelo to prove that I am the number one of the division.” To Flashscore he was more pointed: “I’m not Jaime Munguia or Edgar Berlanga. If he’s expecting an easy night, he’ll be the first to pay the price.”

Alvarez (63-3-2, 39 KOs) is the challenger for the first time in more than a decade and is coming off the loss to Terence Crawford. “I feel strong and ready to step in the ring again,” he said last week. “Mbilli is a great fighter. He’s a tough fighter. He throws a lot of punches, and he’s a champion for a reason. I’m just glad to go face a champion, and I’m ready for that.”

The fight is the first major event of a Riyadh Season that has opened more quietly than announced. Alalshikh had set October 21 as the launch date for the ten-week “Big Time” season. No opening ceremony was reported that night. Instead the zones have been coming online one at a time: the Boulevard City stage on Thursday, its attractions on Saturday, Boulevard World on Sunday, and the rest through November and December, according to a schedule published by What’s On Saudi Arabia. The Venue, where the fight will be held, has no listed opening date beyond Saturday’s card.

Elsewhere on the TKO and Riyadh Season calendar, nothing has moved. UFC 333 drew what Dana White called “the highest attendance for a UFC event in Abu Dhabi history” Saturday, with “over 50 percent of the fans” from outside the UAE, according to MMA Sucka. WWE added Cody Rhodes vs. Randy Orton to Crown Jewel on Friday’s SmackDown, still billed for Riyadh on November 7, after TKO’s Ari Emanuel said on Fox News Thursday that “everything is still set” and that a team is monitoring daily “where we can move it” if Riyadh does not happen. Zuffa Boxing’s Yoenis Adames vs. Gerome Warburton is November 14 in Riyadh, and UFC Riyadh is December 5.

WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman has said he expects to travel at the end of the month because he does not consider it right for the organization’s boxers, judges and referees to be in Riyadh without him. On Sunday night the challenger was in the building, with the heavyweight champion of the world beside him, and the week had not officially started.