BERLIN (Reuters) – The International Olympic Committee on Wednesday granted provisional recognition to World Boxing in a major step towards the sport’s inclusion in the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics.
The boxing competition at the Paris 2024 Olympics was run by the IOC after it stripped the International Boxing Association (IBA) of recognition in 2023 over its failure to implement reforms on governance and finance.
The IOC has not included the sport on the LA 2028 programme yet, having urged national boxing federations to create a new global boxing body or risk missing out on the Olympics in three years’ time.
World Boxing was launched in 2023 and has now 78 members across five continents.
“The (IOC) assessment concluded that World Boxing has continued to make progress regarding the identified areas of consideration in order to be recommended for IOC Provisional Recognition as the IF within the Olympic Movement governing the sport of boxing at world level,” the IOC said in a statement.
The IOC suspended the IBA in 2019 over governance, finance, refereeing and ethical issues and did not involve it in running the boxing events at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, before stripping it of recognition in 2023, an extremely rare move by the IOC.
(Reporting by Karolos Grohmann; Editing by Christian Radnedge)
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