Ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics, the IOC – organizing committee has banished the International Boxing Association (IBA) over failure to meet up with the complete reforms on governance, finance and ethical issues demanded of it.
The IOC’s decision was inevitable after being recommended two weeks ago by the executive board, a body chaired by IOC President Thomas Bach.
Boxing, however, will keep its status as an Olympic sport at the 2024 Paris Games.
“We highly value the sport of boxing. We have an extremely serious problem with IBA because of their governance,” Bach told IOC members during their online meeting.
At a virtual extraordinary IOC Session on Thursday, 69 members voted in favour of exiling the IBA, with only one vote against it. Ten members abstained from the vote.
“The boxers fully deserve to be governed by an international federation with integrity and transparency,” he added.
National boxing federations defied IOC warnings in 2018 by electing Gafur Rakhimov as president. The businessman from Uzbekistan allegedly had ties to organised crime and heroin trafficking. Umar Kremlev’s election to replace Rakhimov in 2020 followed another round of IOC election warnings that went unheeded.
The IBA’s debts approaching $20m were cleared under Kremlev, and the IOC objected to the boxing body’s financial reliance on Russia’s Gazprom.
The IOC is already overseeing boxing competitions for the Paris Olympics without IBA involvement, as it did for the Tokyo Games in 2021.
It was unclear if boxers representing national federations who stay affiliated with the IBA will be classed as eligible for the Paris competition.
The move means that the sport of boxing can now be confirmed on the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic programme, which the IOC and Bach withheld as leverage against IBA. Boxing is “guaranteed” to be in Los Angeles, members were told Thursday.
With the IBA relationship now ended, the IOC can now start to work with a rival organisation created this year called World Boxing, which has drawn support from officials in the United States, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
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