LONDON: Olympic boxing will become just a youth tournament if the International Boxing Association stays excluded as a governing body, IBA president Umar Kremlev said on Monday.

The Russian told Reuters through a translator that the IBA, suspended by the Inter­national Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2019 and stripped of recognition in 2023, was heading into a ‘golden era’ of its own.

“For the boxers it will be important to participate in the world championships and the IBA tournaments. The Olympics will be for the children. It’s children’s sport,” he said via a Zoom call.

“It’s like football and the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics.

“The Olympic games are not developing the sport itself while the International Federation does.

“The most important tournaments should be IBA tournaments including world championships as a pinnacle and Olympic tournaments should be in parallel just for the youth generation, for kids.”

Speaking on the day former Zimbabwean swimmer Kirsty Coventry took the helm of the IOC from Thomas Bach, Kremlev spoke of the German in derogatory terms and offered no conciliatory words to either.

He said future IOC presidents should be elected by countries rather than individual IOC members and Coventry should “leave no trace of Bach”.

Kremlev has history in attacking the IOC and Bach, doing so at the Paris Games in a long and rambling press conference last August that drew a withering response from the Olympic organisation.

“If you ever needed any evidence at all that the IBA is unfit to run boxing just look at the key members of the IBA who took part in that travesty,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said at the time.

Kremlev also repeated a call for Olympic athletes to be paid prize money.

Kremlev heaped scorn on World Boxing, the body created in 2023 that now has more than 100 members and is set to organise the 2028 tournament after the last two were run by the IOC.

“Nobody should compare this particular organisation with the IBA because the IBA is a huge elephant and this organisation is a fly, a small insect who doesn’t live,” said the Russian.

The boxing competition at the Paris 2024 Games was run by the IOC after it stripped the IBA of recognition for failing to implement reforms on governance and finance.

The IBA decided anyway to award prize money to boxers competing in Paris.

Kremlev said more details about the IBA’s future plans would come at a press conference in Istanbul on July 2.

He also gave an update on legal action, threatened in February, against the IOC for allowing Algerian gold medallist Imane Khelif to compete in the women’s tournament at the Paris Games in a gender-eligibility row.

Kremlev said the IBA’s legal team was still looking into the matter but would be taking it to civil courts and not the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

Published in Dawn, June 25th, 2025