Olympic boxing controversy: Banned IBA that's fuelling outcry on Imane Khelif has Russian ties and troubled history

Nearly 17 months ago in New Delhi, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was disqualified from the International Boxing Association’s world championships three days after she won an early-round bout with Azalia Amineva, a previously unbeaten Russian prospect.

The disqualification meant Amineva’s official record was perfect again.

The IBA said Khelif and fellow boxer Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan had failed “to meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors." The governing body claimed the fighters had failed unspecified eligibility tests — the same tests that ignited a massive controversy about gender regulations and perceptions in sports this week as Khelif and Lin compete at the Paris Olympics.

The IBA’s decision last year — and its curious timing, particularly related to Amineva’s loss to Khelif — would have raised warning signs around the sports world if more people cared about amateur boxing, or even knew more about the IBA under president Umar Kremlev of Russia.

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The entire boxing world has already learned to expect almost anything from the Russian-dominated governing body that was given the unprecedented punishment of being permanently banned from the Olympics last year. In fact, it hasn’t run an Olympic boxing tournament since the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016.

The non-boxing world largely doesn’t know, however, about the IBA’s decades of troubled governance and longstanding accusations of a thorough lack of normal transparency in nearly every aspect of its dealings, particularly in recent years. Many people took the IBA’s proclamations about Khelif and Lin at face value while dragging the eligibility dispute into wider clashes about gender identity.

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The International Olympic Committee has decades of mostly bad history with the beleaguered governing body previously known for decades as AIBA, and it has exasperatedly begged non-boxing people to pay attention to the sole source of the allegations against Khelif and Lin.

“These two athletes were the victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said this week. “Such an approach is contrary to good governance.”

On Saturday, IOC President Thomas Bach said it was “totally unacceptable” the two boxers have faced what he called hate speech in a “politically motivated” uproar.

The IOC had stuck with the previous incarnation of boxing’s governing body through decades of judging scandals, bizarre leadership decisions and innumerable financial misdeeds while it presided over Olympic boxing tournaments.

Not until 2019, nearly two years after the organization elected a president with what U.S. officials call deep ties to Russian organized crime and heroin trafficking, did the IOC finally banish the perpetually troubled group.

The most powerful organization in amateur boxing for decades is now governing a reduced roster of national federations while keeping up its fight with the IOC. Nearly three dozen nations, including nearly all of the prominent Western boxing teams, have taken the extraordinary step of leaving the IBA to form World Boxing, a new governing body, in a final attempt to keep boxing in the 2028 Olympics.

AIBA’s final Olympic downfall was triggered about six years ago when it elected president Gafur Rakhimov, an Uzbek businessman described by the U.S. Treasury Department as an organized crime boss. Rakhimov, who denies those allegations, finally resigned in July 2019, a month after the IOC suspended ties.

The group changed its name and elected Kremlev, a Russian boxing functionary and an acquaintance of Russian President Vladimir Putin. That only made things worse between the IBA and the sections of the international boxing community not beholden to the body’s financial support, unlike many smaller boxing nations.

Kremlev introduced Russian state-controlled Gazprom as its biggest sponsor and moved much of the IBA’s operations to Russia after he took over in late 2020. He also fought off a challenge to his leadership two years ago by essentially scrapping an election in highly dubious fashion.

None of this sat well with the IOC — particularly after the Olympic organization advised its governing bodies to prevent Russian athletes from competing with their flags and anthems after Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine in 2022. The IBA disregarded that guidance at its world championships the following year.

The IOC permanently stripped the IBA’s Olympic credentials and ran the past two Olympic boxing tournaments with a task force.

Former governing body president Wu Ching-kuo, the last to take part in an Olympics, made moderate progress in improving AIBA’s reputation until his leadership group decided it would attempt to control boxing in all of its forms — including the professional game. The ill-conceived plan to use the chance for Olympic medals as a cudgel to sign fighters to pro contracts went nowhere, and Wu was eventually drummed out of AIBA himself amid severe financial woes.

But Kremlev has seized his opportunity this summer to call into question the IOC’s governance over the Paris boxing tournament while stoking the wider outcry raised around Khelif and Lin.

Kremlev also has made additional allegations about the gender of both fighters without providing proof, and people across the world have accepted his word. That’s unbelievably frustrating to veteran boxing executives like Boris Van Der Vorst, the Dutch businessman leading World Boxing. Van Der Vorst ran for the presidency of the IBA, only for his candidacy to be inexplicably declared invalid.

People have misidentified Khelif and Lin as men or transgender.

“It’s not very respectful for the boxers who are competing here, to Chinese Taipei and Algeria, to speak about them in these terms. That’s what I’m trying to stress,” Van Der Vorst told The Associated Press.

So much is unclear about the IBA’s decision to ban Khelif and Lin last year, particularly since both had competed in IBA events for years without problems.

It’s even possible the decision was actually made according to the results of legitimate tests conducted over two years, as the IBA says — but the IBA has refused to officially say what, when or where these tests were administered, who evaluated them, or what the results meant.

The national boxing federations of Algeria and Taiwan are still members of the IBA, which is making a last-ditch appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal against its Olympic banishment.

The IOC has said boxing will be dropped from the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics unless the sport lines up behind a new governing body, and World Boxing is the only obvious alternative.

Until then, Kremlev isn’t attempting to make nice with the IOC. He announced plans last month to pay more than $3.1 million to Olympic medalists and coaches, even though IBA has no connection to many of the nations that will win in Paris.

This week, he released a series of English-subtitled videos on social media packed with insults, saying the Olympics “burns from pure devilry” and calling Bach “evil” and urging him to “resign urgently.” Kremlev has ended some of them by saying he’s sending Bach diapers so he doesn’t soil himself, then punching the camera.