(Lausanne) The International Olympic Committee is preparing to ban the International Boxing Federation (IBA) from the Olympic world, the culmination of four years of a conflict which makes it uncertain whether the noble art will be maintained on the Olympic program after Paris-2024.
The executive board of the Lausanne-based body “recommended” on Wednesday at the IOC session, i.e. its general assembly convened on an extraordinary basis on June 22, to “withdraw (its) recognition” from the IBA, already “suspended” since June 26, 2019, she said in a statement.
The suspense is thin, as the IOC session generally ratifies what the executive decides, and the IBA should therefore definitively lose the organization of the Olympic boxing tournaments and the financial windfall that accompanies it, to live solely on its own. resources.
The boxing body, discredited by repeated arbitration scandals, an abysmal debt and a former leader considered by the United States as “one of the leaders of organized crime” Uzbek, had nevertheless proclaimed its desire to reforms by adopting a new president in December 2020, the Russian Umar Kremlev.
But in a vitriolic report also released on Wednesday, the IOC not only found that the IBA “failed to meet the conditions” set for its reinstatement, but that it entered into direct confrontation with the Olympic body, going as far as to “intimidation”, especially when the IOC took away the organization of the Paris-2024 Olympic tournament after having deprived it of that of Tokyo-2020.
The Olympic organization also deplores the persistent financial dependence on the Russian giant Gazprom, its main sponsor brought by Kremlev, who had also challenged the IOC by authorizing Russian and Belarusian boxers to fight under their own colors at the Women’s Worlds in March in India. .
The IOC executive confirms in passing the presence of boxing at the 2024 Olympics in Paris, decided since the end of 2020, but leaves its maintenance at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles unclear, whose final program must be adopted this year.
The disgrace of the IBA coincides with the emergence of a new actor, the very young international federation World Boxing, propelled behind the scenes by several Western federations and already joined by those of the United States and Switzerland. Britain, the Netherlands and New Zealand have indicated they want to follow suit.