The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has established a roadmap with boxing by which, if no one remedies it, it will disappear after these Olympic Games in Paris 2024. Olympic boxing is beginning to die, having definitively severed relations with the International Boxing Association (IBA) and all national federations aligned with it, as reported by the IOC in a statement of Thursday: “The respective NOC will have to exclude such a National Boxing Federation from its membership.” The consequences? Those national federations will end their relationship with their respective Olympic committees and, therefore, with funding to develop Olympic boxing programs. Their goodbye is very near unless someone ‘white glove’ revitalizes the project.
This Wednesday, the IBA announced gourmet prizes for the Olympic medalists in Paris: $100,000 for each gold, $50,000 for each silver and $25,000 for each bronze. The IOC’s response, one day later, has been to “take note of the financial prizes” making it clear that “it is not clear where the money comes from” and that precisely “this total lack of financial transparency was one of the reasons why the IOC withdrew its recognition of the IBA”. Currently, the IBA has not concisely explained the sources of its funding, whose total dependence seems to come from a single sponsor, the Russian state-owned company Gazprom.
Faced with this situation, in addition to the cases of corruption and rigging of 11 bouts in Rio 2016 – boxing being under the umbrella of the former AIBA (from which the IBA was born) – the IOC decided to organize itself the pre-Olympic and Olympic tournaments for Tokyo and Paris, but is not willing to repeat for Los Angeles 2028, so right now it considers that boxing will not be in that Olympic event if no one remedies it.
Boxing in Tokyo 2020. (Hollandse Hoogte/Shutterstock)
In this case, the consequences can be devastating for boxing worldwide considering that the National Olympic Committees will be forced to exclude their respective national boxing federations and that “any boxer whose National Federation adheres to the IBA will not be able to participate in the LA28 Olympic Games”, says the IOC. Thus, these federations will see their budgets substantially reduced. The inflow of capital from national governments will be much lower because it will no longer be an Olympic federation.
BOXING TO SMALL PRIVATE EVENTS
In this way, and observing the current trend, it seems that the sport of the four ropes will be reduced to the realm of small private professional boxing events, with little development of young athletes and no major international events. Without development and with less visibility, the flame of a sport that was first Olympic in 1904 seems to be extinguished.
What is the solution to avoid this demise? Unfortunately, in the eyes of the IOC, there is no serious alternative at present. The other international federation, World Boxing, has stopped growing, is not economically sustainable, does not have a competition program, has no real infrastructure and, most seriously, its members are part of AIBA’s past, with which the IOC does not want to have any relationship.
[Read the IOC statement on the International Boxing Association (IBA)]
Faced with such a scenario, “Olympic boxing needs to be organized by a credible and well-governed International Federation,” explained the IOC in its statement on Thursday. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary the creation of a body that leads a new international boxing, which has nothing to do with the past and is based on close cooperation with the IOC in terms of transparency, sustainability, structure and good governance. In addition, as SportsIn has learned, it will have to have Olympic boxing as its main purpose and for this it must have the support of the different national boxing federations. It is not a simple task, but it is the only possible way to save the sport from being ostracized, reduced to a small circle and swallowed up by other contact sports that are booming and have a better infrastructure.
