 "IOC vs IBA: Olympic boxing on the ropes after years of scandal")
Boxing has once again been shrouded in controversy at a Summer Olympics. Instead of achievements and feats inside the ring, the events outside of it have gathered plenty of headlines.
Once again, question marks have been raised over the officiating . But, it dwarfs the gender row that has embroiled two women competitors.
At the heart of the controversy lies the dysfunctional administration of amateur boxing, which has passed many hands over the years, and a bitter dispute between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Boxing Association (IBA).
What is the dispute?
In 2019, the IOC stripped IBA of its right to organise Olympic boxing, turning festering tension between the two organisations into an open confrontation.
The IBA had been dogged for years by governance problems, suspicions of corruption and complaints about incompetence.
Former chief Wu Ching-kuo of Taiwan resigned in 2017 following an accounting scandal and a cheating row which saw 36 officials and referees suspended over allegations of bout-fixing at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Wu was followed by several other short-lived leaders, including an Uzbek businessman said by the US Treasury Department to be linked to “transnational criminal organisations”.
Current president Umar Kremlev, a Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch, began his term in office in 2020 promising to restore the IBA’s standing.
But in June last year, IOC expelled the IBA from the Olympic movement, saying it had failed to address any of its concerns.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsIn a sign of how bad relations were, Kremlev’s IBA compared its expulsion to Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
How has this affected boxing?
Most Olympic sports are overseen by their international sports federations. With IBA suspended, IOC organised the boxing event in Tokyo in 2021, and then again in Paris 2024.
This has become significant because the IBA and IOC have different eligibility criteria for the women’s competition.
The IBA organised unspecified "gender" tests on two boxers, Imane Khelif from Algeria and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, during the IBA-organised World Championships in New Delhi in June 2023.
Both women were then excluded, mid-competition, having reached the latter stages.
The IBA informed the IOC that Khelif had XY male chromosomes , according to media reports which were confirmed by the IOC on Sunday.
But the Olympics body has repeatedly rejected the tests this week as “arbitrary” and “cobbled together” and has argued against so-called sex testing – genetic tests using swabs or blood – which it scrapped in 1999.
It has allowed Khelif and Lin to compete in Paris because anyone recognised as a woman in their passport is eligible to fight.
The IBA and other critics say this raises “serious questions about both competitive fairness and athletes’ safety”.
Why has it got personal?
Kremlev has delivered several offensive diatribes against IOC president Thomas Bach and said the Olympics had been organised by “hyenas” who deserved to be taken to “a pig farm”.
There are hints of the geopolitics at play, with Kremlev calling for the respect of “traditional values” and railing against the celebration of LGBTQ+ rights during the opening ceremony of the Paris Games.
Those criticisms echo talking points from Kremlin officials about Paris 2024, where Russian athletes have been prevented from competing in national colours because of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
IOC spokesman Mark Adams urged reporters on Sunday to look at the videos published by Kremlev, saying they were “actually quite shocking, quite undermining of any credibility that he may have had”.
He also suggested that the gender tests ordered on Khelif in particular might have been a reaction to her defeating Russian opponent Azalia Amineva at the World Championships in New Delhi.
“I know that the boxer did meet and beat a Russian,” Adams said, “A decision to do the testing was taken on the spot there. Under what purpose? What for? I don’t know.”
What next?
The IOC’s determination to sideline the IBA will only have hardened during the Paris Olympics and there appears to be no way back for as long as Kremlev remains president.
The IOC has been encouraging the boxing world to coalesce around a new governing body, possibly World Boxing, which is backed by many Western nations.
Unless a new global governing body emerges, boxing’s place at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics is in doubt.
“Boxing can only be in the Olympic Games in Los Angeles if we have a reliable partner,” Bach said on Saturday. “So now the national boxing federations, they have to make their choice. It’s up to them.”
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