Boxing receives Olympic ultimatum to be included in Los Angeles 2028

It is time for national boxing federations to decide whether their athletes will compete at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games under the umbrella of a new global organization or whether the sport will be absent, the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said. , Thomas Bach.

The boxing competition at the 2024 Paris Olympics was organized by the IOC after last year denying recognition to the International Boxing Association (IBA) for its failure to implement governance and training reforms. finances.

Although boxing has been contested at every Olympic Games since 1904 (except 1912), the IOC has yet to include the sport in the Los Angeles 2028 program and has urged national boxing federations to create a new world boxing organization, under penalty of missing the Olympic Games in four years. years.

“It’s up to the national boxing federations to decide whether or not they want their athletes to have the opportunity to win Olympic medals,” Bach told a news conference after an executive committee meeting. THURSDAY.

“It’s very simple and we see that there are movements with a number of federations.”

A new organization called World Boxing was launched in 2023 and has 55 members spread across five continents. It is the only body likely to replace the IBA as the sport’s world body and the IOC has said a decision will be made in 2025.

“We are monitoring this and when the time comes we will have to make, as with any recognition or provisional recognition of an international federation, an assessment as to whether there is a federation,” added Bach, who will resign in March.

“At the moment it seems that the only thing that could be is World Boxing and if they meet the criteria that we have for such a situation, it cannot be IBA. This story is over for all the reasons, the reasons governance and the ethical reasons that you know.

The IOC suspended the IBA in 2019 for governance, financial, refereeing and ethics reasons and did not involve it in organizing the boxing events at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, before withdraw its recognition in 2023, an extremely rare decision by the IOC.

The IOC and the IBA had also been in disagreement for several days during the Paris Olympics over the participation of two female boxers, the Algerian Imane Khelif and the 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 to compete and both won gold medals in their weight categories.

Reuters