The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has increased the pressure on the ruling boxing body IBA by threatening to axe the sport from the program of the 2024 Games in Paris.
The IOC said it may “have to include the cancellation of boxing for the Olympic Games Paris 2024” in the wake of the latest IBA developments.
Like at Tokyo 2020, IBA (formerly AIBA) would not run the boxing events in Paris, with the IOC itself in charge. IOC president Thomas Bach said last week that as it stands now the same would happen 2028 in Los Angeles.
The IOC has criticised IBA for years over governance issues, lacking transparancy, refereeing and judging, and suspended it in 2019.
IBA has changed its leadership but the relationship has further soured under the reign of Russian Umar Kremlev as IBA has now blamed former president CK Wu for all wrongdoings and insisted that reforms have been carried out.
But there was no official vote at the recent presidential elections despite an according decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and the IOC is also unhappy that IBA is dependent on their main Russian sponsor Gazprom which is close to the Russian government.
“The recent IBA Congress has shown once more that IBA has no real interest in the sport of boxing and the boxers, but is only interested in its own power,” the IOC said.
“The decisions and discussions to keep boxers away from the Olympic qualifiers and the Olympic Games cannot be understood differently. It has also become clear again, that IBA wants to distract from its own grave governance issues by pointing to the past, which has been addressed by the IOC already in 2019.”
Bach told IBA last week that their “issues have to be addressed in a way of substance and by facts and not by some PR efforts, but by measures of substance.”
