World Boxing now recognized by the IOC, is the Olympic future of boxing assured?

World Boxing, the international federation launched in 2023, should take charge of the future of Olympic boxing . This Wednesday, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) granted its "provisional" recognition to the young world body, lifting the mortgage that had weighed on the Olympic future of boxing for years. By making World Boxing the body "governing boxing at the world level within the Olympic movement", the IOC executive board is at the same time closing the door to any return of the IBA , banned since 2019 and which has execrable relations with the Lausanne organization.

Created in 2023, World Boxing currently has only 78 member federations, but "has demonstrated that 62% of boxers and 58% of medallists at the Paris Olympics" were affiliated with these federations, while showing "progress" on governance criteria, the IOC lists. The very young body, whose main members include the United States, Japan, Great Britain, France and Germany, compared to only six African countries, should recover the organization of the Olympic boxing tournament at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

The continued inclusion of this sport in the Olympic programme since the first modern Games in 1896 was in fact conditional on the IOC recognising an international federation capable of supervising it. The IOC had twice had to take charge of the direct organisation of the Olympic tournament at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, after the suspension of the IBA, and then at the Paris Games, after its definitive exclusion from the Olympic movement.

Not only does the Lausanne organisation not intend to replace the role of an international federation in the long term, but the Paris boxing tournament has also been at the heart of a controversy triggered by the IBA over the gender of two competitors, the Algerian Imane Khelif and the Taiwanese Lin Yu-ting .