IOC threatens to drop boxing from the Paris Olympics

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Frustrated with corruption allegations and an increasingly adversarial relationship with the organization that runs global boxing, the International Olympic Committee is considering dropping the sport from the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight In a statement provided to The Washington Post, the IOC blasted the International Boxing Association and its president, Umar Kremlev.

“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,” the IOC statement read, in part. “… The IOC will have to take all this into consideration when it takes further decisions, which may — after these latest developments — have to include the cancellation of boxing for the Olympic Games Paris 2024.”

The statement comes days after Kremlev attacked the IOC’s refusal to include boxing in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics unless the IBA makes significant reforms after a match-fixing scandal at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.

“They have no right to dictate to us how to live,” Kremlev said at IBA’s Global Boxing Forum in Abu Dhabi last week. “No other organization should interfere or meddle in the business of our association.”

Kremlev, who was elected in 2020, has been accused of centralizing the IBA’s power in his native Russia, spending heavily on marketing that appears to promote himself and depending too heavily on the IBA’s lone sponsor, Russian energy company Gazprom. He has, at times, suggested moving away from the Games, saying Olympic leaders have “no real interest in the sport of boxing and the boxers but is only interested in its own power.”

Earlier this year, the IOC said it would run the boxing competition in Paris, as it did in Tokyo, following a report on the fixed fights in Rio. Two weeks ago it even laid out a schedule of boxing qualifying events. Thursday’s statement is the first time the IOC has suggested it might drop the sport from the 2024 program. A decision would have to be made before qualifying events begin next summer.

The statement follows an odd two-week period in which the IBA sent a delegation to the IOC’s headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, asking for boxing to be added to the Los Angeles Games, only to see Kremlev unload on the IOC days later and suggest the organization might move away from the Olympics.

Since he took over the IBA, Kremlev has promised reforms, but questions about judging at IBA-run events have persisted because of his refusal to have an outside system of referees and judges. His reelection this year was plagued with problems after his primary opponent, Dutch boxing head Boris van der Vorst, was disqualified a day before the vote. The Court of Arbitration for Sport later forced a second election, which never happened after the IBA voted not to hold one.

Despite persistent problems with boxing, the IOC has been hesitant to give up on the sport — its inclusion dates from the 1904 Games — because it brings the kind of economic, racial, cultural and geographic diversity the IOC wants. But because the IOC does not want to run boxing’s Olympic competitions in perpetuity, the standoff with Kremlev suggests the sport’s future in the Games may be in jeopardy unless new leadership or a new organization was to take control.

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