The International Olympic Committee is tanking a stand against amateur boxing’s governing body. The Association of International Boxing Association’s repeated displays of incompetence and corruption have put itself in jeopardy of losing its Olympic standing as the IOC refused to reinstate its funding this week.
AIBA, who lost their IOC funding a year ago now, applied to have it reinstated and were denied earlier this week due to a lack of progress made in addressing the issues that stripped the funding to being with. Their most recent shady move has been to name Gafur Rakhimov as its Interim President. It is an open secret that the power Uzbek is one of the most powerful criminals in his country. The US government has publicly named him as such due to his success in drug trafficking. That alone would be enough for any rational organization to take action, but somehow it isn’t the IOC’s only bone to pick with AIBA.
Previous president Wu Ching-kuo resigned for what is generously being labeled “financial mismanagement” costing tens of millions of dollars. Draw your own conclusions there. Furthermore, AIBA has not been able to satisfactorily run or enforce an anti-doping program in the eyes of the IOC. We also are well versed in their judging and refereeing issues historically. Some of those have at least felt like something more malicious than bad work done by the officials too.
In its report, the IOC noted that it “reserves the right to review the inclusion of boxing on the program of the… Olympic Games Tokyo 2020.” Obviously, that is not good. While AIBA submited a progress report here that failed, they will get another chance in a couple months. Hopefully they get their act together enough to make sure we still get fights in Tokyo. I wouldn’t miss the event itself, necessarily, but the hype generated is still very important the professsional game we hold so dearly here. Anthony Joshua, for example, was launched by the Olympics. He wouldn’t be quite the star he is without that experience. Even if it was just for one rotation, boxing losing the Olympics would be a major blow to the sport overall.
