IOC grants provisional recognition to new governing body World Boxing

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) on Wednesday granted provisional recognition to World Boxing, in a major step toward the sport's inclusion in the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.

The boxing competition at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics was run by the IOC, after it banished the International Boxing Association (IBA) from the Olympic Movement in 2023 over its failure to implement governance and finance reforms.

The IOC has not included the sport on the program for the 2028 Games 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 [international federation] within the Olympic Movement governing the sport of boxing at world level," the IOC said in a statement.

The relevant criteria involved sufficient members across five continents, application of the sports integrity process implemented during the Paris Games including independent oversight, good governance structures, and assurances on revenues, and signing up to the World Anti-Doping Code.

The IOC's recognition, even though it is currently provisional, means the sport can now push toward continued Olympic inclusion in 2028, having overcome the biggest hurdle in relation to the Games, which was the creation of a new global body for the sport.

"This is a very significant day for everyone connected with the sport of boxing in the Olympic movement," said World Boxing president Boris van der Vorst. "Keeping its place at the Olympic Games is absolutely critical to the future of our sport at every level ... and this decision by the IOC takes us one step closer to our objective of seeing boxing restored to the Olympic program. There is still a lot of work to do, and everyone is as committed as ever to continuing to work together and doing everything within our power to deliver a better future for our sport and ensuring that boxing remains at the heart of the Olympic Movement."

The IOC suspended the IBA, run by Russian businessman Umar Kremlev, in 2019 over governance, finance, refereeing and ethical issues, and did not involve the organization in running the boxing events at the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021, before stripping the IBA of recognition in 2023, an extremely rare move by the IOC.