Gender row may hurt boxing’s Olympic future

Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting

The boxing competition at the Paris Olympics is over but the fight now starts for its inclusion at the 2028 LA Games after a damaging gender controversy placed the sport under renewed scrutiny. Boxing is a staple of the modern Olympics, making its debut in 1904 and contested at every Games since, apart from in 1912.

Boxing at the Paris Games took place in mostly packed houses. And yet when the Los Angeles Olympics comes around four years from now, it is not certain that it will be on the programme. That was even before a gender eligibility row broke out in the French capital. "I think it has hurt Olympic boxing at a crucial time where its future is still being discussed," Steve Bunce, a veteran British boxing journalist, said on the BBC. "It's an absolute disaster."

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Spencer Oliver, a British former boxer who was in the French capital as a radio pundit, agrees. "It's just a mess because boxing comes into the spotlight again," Oliver told AFP. "But it's for the wrong reason." At the heart of boxing's problems is a protracted and open dispute between the IOC and the Russian-led IBA. Boxing at the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games in 2021 went ahead only after the IOC stepped in to run it and the IOC again organised the sport in Paris, having effectively frozen the IBA out of the Olympic movement.

IOC president Thomas Bach has warned that boxing's national federations need to find a new and "reliable" international partner for the IOC to be sure the sport features on the programme for 2028. Bach said on Friday that the IOC would take the decision on its inclusion in the first half of 2025. The IBA's main contribution in Paris was to stage a chaotic press conference that was intended to clarify why it disqualified Algeria's Imane Khelif and Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting from its world championships last year. IBA president Umar Kremlev, a Kremlin-linked oligarch, claimed that the two fighters had "genetic testing that shows that these are men."

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