IBA’s Role in Boxing: A Question of Integrity?

In this week’s Member Insights piece, David Alexander, the founder and MD of Calacus PR spotlights how gender has become a huge issue in sport as well as society.

Ever since South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya underwent tests to prove her gender back in 2009, and the LGBTQ+ community has found a voice in mainstream society, there have been questions raised about fairness and eligibility.

The issue was thrown back into the limelight during the Paris 2024 boxing competition when Italian boxer Angela Carini broke down in tears and quit her bout against the Algerian Imane Khelif after 46 seconds in a fight that sparked huge controversy at the Olympics.

Khelif is one of two boxers permitted to fight at the Games despite being disqualified from the women’s world championships last year for allegedly failing gender eligibility tests.

The International Boxing Association, (IBA) has had a difficult few years, with concerns over governance and integrity ultimately seeing it removed as boxing’s Olympic governing body by the International Olympic Committee (IOC)  in 2023.

Former President Gafur Rakhimov was said to by the U.S. Treasury Department to have strong links to organised crime, which led the IOC to launch an inquiry and suspend IBA initially in 2019.

Rakhimov’s successor, Russian Umar Kremlev, is said to have strong links to state President Vladimir Putin while the governing body has been backed by Russian state energy firm Gazprom, which Kremlev said had ceased to be the case since 2023.

Concerns over the integrity of bouts and judging were underlined by report by sports investigator Richard McLaren which said “corruption abounded” when he concluded his report into IBA’s governance.

IBA is also under threat from the newly-formed World Boxing, which was set up by former IBA presidential candidate Boris van der Vorst, who have already held talks with the IOC about leading the boxing at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028 and have almost three dozen nations supporting them.

So it’s fair to say that IBA’s credibility continues to be stretched. 

Last year, Khelif and fellow boxer Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan were disqualified from the World Boxing Championships. 

“Based on DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to trick their colleagues into posing as women,” the Association’s president, Umar Kremlev, told Russia’s Tass news agency at the time. “According to the results of the tests, it was proved that they have XY chromosomes. Such athletes were excluded from competition.”

It was a pure coincidence that Khelif had beaten Russian opponent Azalia Amineva in the semi-final, her disqualification ensuring that Amineva’s unbeaten record was restored.

Fast forward to Paris and Khelif, who was born and raised a woman, and does not identify as either transgender or intersex.

The controversy over her inclusion in the women’s 66kg boxing event prompted everyone from author JK Rowling, Tesla billionaire Elon Musk and former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss to pour scorn over Khelif’s inclusion.

Carini, meanwhile, expressed regret over her actions in the ring. “All this controversy makes me sad,” Carini told Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport. “I’m sorry for my opponent, too. If the IOC said she can fight, I respect that decision. It wasn’t something I intended to do. 

“Actually, I want to apologise to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke.”

The IOC made a statement criticising IBA’s governance and later IOC President Thomas Bach confirmed that the boxers were not transgender.

He confirmed: “We have two boxers who are born as women, who have been raised as women, who have a passport as a woman and have competed for many years as women. Some want to own a definition of who is a women.”

He went on to underline the IOC’s position while referring to the wider and politically motivated campaign by Russian interests against the IOC and the Paris Olympics. 

He added: “What we have seen from the Russian side and in particular from the (IBA),” Bach said, “they have undertaken already way before these Games with a defamation campaign against France, against the Games, against the IOC.”

IOC Director of Communications, Mark Adams, dismissed the legitimacy of IBA’s testing and the frenzy it was attempting to capitalise on.

He said: “The whole process is flawed. From the conception of the test, to the way the test was shared with us, to the way the tests were made public, it’s so flawed that it’s impossible to engage with it.

“I’m not going to discuss the individual intimate details of athletes in public, which I think is quite disgraceful for those who leaked that material. Frankly, it must be terrible to be put in that position. On top of all the social media harassment these athletes have had to endure.”

Despite their lack of involvement from Paris 2024, IBA called a press conference to build upon the controversy and explain why they had banned Khelif from their own event last year.

Given their reputation as an organisation, and despite of the facts as laid out by the IOC, what IBA needed to do was show leadership, authority and professionalism.

That would send a message to the world that they are a serious organisation capable of representing the diverse boxing family and acting with integrity.

What transpired was quite the opposite.

Reporters were kept waiting for the press conference for over an hour amid technical difficulties which were to affect the translations, the live feed to Kremlev in Russia and the sound system.

One reporter described the event as “the most extraordinary, chaotic, shambolic and badly organised international sporting press conference I have ever attended,” and it was perhaps a fatal blow to IBA’s hopes of regaining Olympic Programme control for boxing.

The speakers rambled, avoided answering direct questions and there was no coherent messaging to convince the attendant media that IBA, and by extension its point of view, was credible.

IBA Chief Executive, Chris Roberts, a former British Army officer, revealed that blood tests carried out by a laboratory in Istanbul during the 2022 World Championship came up as inconsistent for Khelif and another boxer, with a similar test the next year leading to her disqualification. 

He added that the controversy “wasn’t anything that we wanted. We delivered the test information to the IOC and they haven’t done anything with it because they believe in their own criteria, which is the passport. We never intended to raise any issues because this is not our event. We are now here because the media has questions.”

Kremlev used the opportunity to attack the IOC and President Bach again, claiming that he was standing up for women’s sport, despite all the speakers being men.

In a rambling tirade that prompted journalists to leave or ask him to stop talking, Kremlev said; “As a Christian, the Olympic opening ceremony was something horrible. Today we are destroying sport, especially feminine sport. 

“We have genetic tests showing that these are men. We have not checked what’s between their legs. There are doctors and medics who can verify these things. We don’t know whether they were born like that or changes were made. 

“Today we are witnessing the death of women’s boxing, the corruption of judges. All this is happening while Mr Bach is president (of the IOC). Under no circumstances should we allow women’s boxing to be destroyed. Today not only is women’s boxing being destroyed, but I believe that in the future they will also try to destroy women’s sport.”

Several journalists and other people who were attending left in disgust, at not just the language, but the tone of the answers from the IBA participants.

Nothing is ever off the record with journalists and it was laughable that Roberts then contradicted his President by confirming that Gazprom was still a sponsor and also undermining the validity of the 2023 tests by saying that there was no independent presence when they took place.

No wonder the IOC’s Mark Adams responded: “It was a chaotic farce. The organization and the content of this press conference tells you everything you need to know about their governance and credibility.

“It clearly demonstrates that the sport of boxing needs a new federation to run boxing. 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 yesterday.

“We would love to see boxing, we want to see boxing on the programme in LA. Now it is up to the boxing community to organise themselves for the sport and for the athletes.” 

Beyond the confusion, the chaos and the shambles that was IBA’s press conference, not once did any of the speakers show any sympathy for the online bullying and abuse that Khelif has faced.

Khelif had earlier said the furore was having “massive effects” as she called for restraint. “I send a message to all the people of the world to uphold the Olympic principles and the Olympic Charter, to refrain from bullying all athletes, because this has effects,” she said.

After winning gold by beating Chinese world champion Yang Liu by a unanimous decision over five rounds to win welterweight gold, Khelif said: “I am fully qualified to take part in this competition. I’m a woman like any other woman. 

“For eight years, this has been my dream, and I’m now the Olympic champion and gold medalist. That also gives my success a special taste because of those attacks.

“We are in the Olympics to perform as athletes, and I hope that we will not see any similar attacks in future Olympics.

“I was born a woman, I lived a woman, I competed as a woman, there’s no doubt about that. [The detractors] are enemies of success, that is what I call them. And that also gives my success a special taste because of these attacks.

“As for the IBA, since 2018 I have been boxing under their umbrella. They know me very well, they know what I’m capable of, they know how I’ve developed over the years but now they are not recognised any more. They hate me and I don’t know why. I send them a single message: with this gold medal, my dignity, my honour is above everything else.”

Paris 2024 will go down as one of the greatest Olympiad of all time, with the Khelif affair a rare controversy which raised questions of fairness and safety. But Khelif has struggled in other competitions, her Olympic gold surely the peak of her career which has never been characterised by overly powerful punching.

Sadly for IBA, their communications and their shambolic Paris press conference end any hope they had of regaining the hearts and minds of the boxing community, or, more importantly, the support of the IOC.

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