LAUSANNE, Switzerland (Reuters) – It is time for national boxing federations to decide if their athletes will be at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics under a new global body or if the sport will miss out, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach said on Thursday.
The boxing competition at the Paris 2024 Olympics was run by the IOC after it stripped the International Boxing Association (IBA) of recognition last year over its failure to implement reforms on governance and finance.
The IOC has not included the sport on the LA 2028 programme yet and has urged national boxing federations to create a new global boxing body or risk missing out on the Olympics in four years’ time.
“This is in the hands of the national boxing federations and whether they want their athletes to have an opportunity to win Olympic medals or not,” Bach told a press conference at the end of an executive board meeting.
“It is very easy and we see there are some moves with a number of federations.”
A new organisation called World Boxing was launched in 2023 and has 55 members across five continents.
It is the only body that would potentially be able to replace the IBA as the sport’s global organisation. The IOC has said a decision will be taken in 2025.
“We are watching this and when the time comes then we have to make, like for any recognition or provisional recognition of an international federation, an assessment whether there is a federation,” Bach, who is stepping down in March, said.
“At this moment it looks like the only it could be is World Boxing and whether they are meeting the criteria which we have for such a situation,” he said.
“It cannot be IBA. This story is over for all the reasons, the governance and ethical reasons you know.”
The IOC suspended the IBA in 2019 over governance, finance, refereeing and ethical issues and did not involve it in running the boxing events at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, before stripping it of recognition in 2023, an extremely rare move by the IOC.
The IOC and IBA had also been at loggerheads for days during the Paris Olympics over the participation of two female boxers, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwanese Lin Yu-ting.
The IBA banned the fighters midway through last year’s World Championships following a chromosome test, citing gender ineligibility, but the IOC allowed them both to compete and both won gold medals in their weight classes.
(Reporting by Karolos Grohmann; Editing by Toby Davis)
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