The Executive Board of the International Olympic Committee recommended on Monday the inclusion of boxing at the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Games, ending a saga of years on the Olympic future of sport.
The IOC last month gave provisional recognition to world boxing in an important step towards the inclusion of sport at the 2028 Olympic Games.
“After the provisional recognition of world boxing in February, we were in a position to make this decision so that this recommendation has to go to the session,” said the president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, to a press conference.
“I am sure that the session will approve it.”
The recommendation will now be voted in the IOC session in Greece this week and is expected to pass easily, with boxing among the popular Olympic sports.
The boxing competition in the Paris 2024 games was directed by the IOC after having stripped the International Boxing Recognition Association in 2023 for its failure to implement reforms on governance and finance.
The IOC had not included the sport in the initial program of the 2028, after having urged the National Boxing Federations to create a new Boxing Global Agency. World Boxing, now with more than 80 national federations as members, was launched in 2023.
“This is a very significant and important decision for Olympic boxing and takes the sport one step closer to being restored to the Olympic program,” said Boris Van Vorst, president of World Boxing in a statement.
“I have no doubt that everyone will be received very positively by all those connected to boxing, at all levels of the world, which includes the critical importance for the future of boxing sport that continues to be part of the Olympic movement.”
The IOC said that only athletes whose national federations were members of world boxing at the time of the start of the qualification events for the 2028 Olympic Games could participate in Los Angeles.
“Somewhere between two years before the Games,” said the sports director of the IOC, Kit McConnell, when asked at what time the national federations needed to join World Boxing so that their athletes are eligible for Los Angeles.
“It is not frozen. Now we see an acceleration of the number of federations that join [World Boxing]. They must be members at the time of the qualification events, ”added McConnell.
The IOC suspended the IMB, led by the Russian businessman, Umar Kremlev, in 2019 about governance, finance, arbitration and ethical problems and did not imply it in the execution of boxing events in the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games, before stripping him of recognition in 2023, an extremely rare movement by the IOC.
