A nearly unanimous vote by the International Olympic Committee has resulted in the International Boxing Association being dropped from participating at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. The vote was 69-1, with 10 members choosing not to cast a vote in the decision to remove the IBA from participating the Games.
"We highly value the sport of boxing. We have an extremely serious problem with IBA because of their governance," Bach told IOC members during an online meeting, according to NBC Sports.
The disagreements between the two parties stemmed from the IBA's recent operation under presidents from Uzbekistan and Russia. The governing body's finances were also supported by Russian state energy firm Gazprom.
There has been quite a bit of controversy in boxing events overseen by the IBA in recent Olympic Games. During the 2012 London Olympics, there were allegations of cash deals in order to fix who won specific medals.
The integrity of the bouts in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics were also called into question after the 2012 allegations and the IBA has seen constant turmoil at its highest levels since then. During the 2016 Games, longtime IOC member C.K. Wu was the IBA president. Wu ended up facing allegations of financial mismanagement, and eventually resigned from his position in 2017.
Following Wu resigning, Gafur Rakhimov -- a businessman from Uzbekistan-- was named IBA president in 2018, but because of allegations of ties to organized crime, he was replaced by Mohamed Moustahsane in an interim capacity in 2019. In 2020, Umar Kremlev became the IBA's permanent president. Kremlev has served as the IBA president since being elected to that post in 2020, and the IBA has accumulated $20 million in debt under Kremlev.
The IOC will oversee all boxing matches during the 2024 Paris Olympics without any participation from the IBA. The IOC also oversaw all the boxing competitions in the Tokyo Olympics back in 2021.
