SO, where do we go now?
The dust has barely settled on Ireland’s most successful Olympic Games, with the team paraded through the packed streets of Dublin on Monday afternoon – the city’s darling, Kellie Harrington, back on terra ferma after her gold medal-winning exploits.
But the Olympic glow cannot mask the fact that amateur boxing is now entering the Championship rounds of its biggest ever fight, with the events of the past fortnight in Paris not helping the cause for its retention at LA 2028.
The uncivil war between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the discredited International Boxing Association (IBA) leaves the sport’s offer of Olympic dreams on life support.
Having stepped in and formed a boxing taskforce to host the Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 competitions, the IOC will now officially wash its hands of boxing. We’d love to say it’s been fun, but…
The IBA – banned by the IOC over ongoing governance issues - did everything in its power to destabilise the Paris Games, and to make life as uncomfortable as possible for the IOC.
The whole gender eligibility row involving Algerian Imane Khelif and Chinese Taipei’s Lin Yu Ting – both of whom would finish up on top of the podium – came from them. Those details could have been released at any stage since last year’s IBA-run World Championships, when both were disqualified after reportedly failing unspecified gender eligibility tests.
Yet it all came to light during boxing’s biggest moment. Coincidence?
For their part, IOC judges justified the decision to include them saying the testing conducted on them by the sport’s now-banned governing body, the International Boxing Association, was “impossibly flawed” and that Lin and Khelif were “born and raised as women”.
Then, following a series of questionable decisions – with none more contentious than Daina Moorehouse’s controversial exit – came reports in The Times that two of the judges involved in the Bray woman’s defeat to France’s Wassila Lkhadiri were deemed to be at “high risk” of manipulating bouts, with both stood down during the IBA’s 2021 World Championships in Serbia.
What a shocking mess the sport finds itself in.
Last Friday, IOC president Thomas Back said a decision on boxing’s inclusion in Los Angeles must be made in 2025. Time is running out fast, and Ireland finds itself right in the middle of it all, with some huge decisions to be made.
Inside the athletes’ village on Saturday night, Sarah Keane - president of the Olympic Federation of Ireland (OFI) - raised the prospect of a new national body being set up to run boxing in Ireland if the Irish Athletic Boxing Association (IABA) does not sever its links with the Russian-led IBA.
She also revealed the OFI will withdraw recognition of the IABA as the national federation in the coming months at the request of the International Olympic Committee unless the IABA link up with World Boxing, the newly-established federation whose aim is to secure the sport’s Olympic future.
It is now 12 months since a motion to change the IABA’s constitution, which would have enabled the association to leave the IBA and join World Boxing, fell five votes short of receiving the required 75 per cent majority at a chaotic EGM in the National Stadium.
“We hope in the next couple of months that the IABA will ask its community a question so at least then we know how they feel. I hope people come out and make their voices heard,” she said.
“Then if they vote in favour of the change, we will do everything we can to support them around that.
“If they vote to stay part of the IBA then the only way that it is going to be possible for boxing to stay as part of the Olympic Games is for a new national federation to be recognised in some shape or form which takes on high performance and is recognised by World Boxing.
“For me, the situation is starting to simplify because it is starting to be about decisions.”
And the outcome of those decisions, whatever they may be, will dictate just what Ireland’s boxing future looks like. These truly are worrying times.
