How gender row clouded boxing at Paris Olympics

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.

Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Floyd Mayweather and Lennox Lewis, to name just a few, all started out at the Olympics.

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, overshadowing the action in the ring and only adding to the scrutiny of the sport and how it is run.

“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.”

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.”

– Gender row –
At the heart of boxing’s problems is a protracted and open dispute between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Russian-led International Boxing Association.

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