Boxing is expected to be part of the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said Monday, with the tournaments to be run by World Boxing, the newly recognized governing body attempting to salvage the sport’s presence on the program.
Bach’s announcement eased doubts about whether one of the oldest sports in the Summer Games would be included, following years of disputes about how international competitions are governed and clear antagonism during the Paris Games last year regarding the inclusion of two women, whose eligibility became a flashpoint of the global event.
World Boxing was granted provisional recognition by the IOC board as the sport’s new governing body in February. It is a breakaway group from the International Boxing Association, which spent the Paris Games railing against Bach and other leaders for allowing Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan to compete when they had been declared ineligible under murky stances from the IBA’s world championships in 2023.
Both women won golds in Paris in their weight classes, and the IOC affirmed their eligibility to compete even as the IBA said — without giving details and with conflicting public statements — that Khelif and Lin had failed what it characterized as its gender eligibility tests.
The IBA was the sport’s recognized governing body from 1946 until it was suspended by the IOC in 2019 due to financial issues and organizational problems, including concerns about corruption. Those worries ramped up following the election of IBA president Umar Kremlev in 2020, and the IOC expelled the IBA in 2023 for failing to show sufficient progress.
An IOC-organized taskforce oversaw the sport at the 2020 and 2024 Summer Olympics, but the IOC pledged that it would not run the tournament again.
Bach said Monday that the IOC executive board greenlit the continuation of Olympic boxing. The last hurdle for the Los Angeles program is approval during a full IOC session this week. Bach said he expects that passage to be a formality.
“I am very confident that the session will approve it so that all the boxers of the world then have certainty that they can participate in the Olympic Games L.A. 2028 if their national federation is recognized by World Boxing,” Bach said, according to The Associated Press.
World Boxing membership is made up of 84 national federations but includes just seven African nations and lacks membership from Spain and Russia, where the IBA is based. According to data from the IOC, 62 percent of boxers from the 2024 Games were affiliated with World Boxing members.
“This is a very significant and important decision for Olympic boxing and takes the sport one step closer to being restored to the Olympic program,” Boris van der Vorst, president of World Boxing, said in a statement Monday.
“World Boxing understands that being part of the Olympic Games is a privilege and not a right and I assure the IOC that if boxing is restored to the program for LA28, that World Boxing is completely committed to being a trustworthy and reliable partner that will adhere to and uphold the values of the Olympic Charter.”
The gender controversy at the Paris Games highlighted the discord and chaos of the IBA while also inflaming the global debate about how to manage eligibility for women’s sports.
The IBA said Khelif and Lin were found to have “competitive advantages over other female competitors” but offered little additional explanation in a hastily-arranged press conference. An IOC spokesman said last summer that Khelif and Lin were “eligible by the rules of the federation” to compete as women. Both Khelif and Lin were assigned female at birth and have always identified as women.
In February, the IBA said it was planning to file criminal complaints against the IOC in the United States, France and Switzerland, citing an executive order by U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump signed the “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” order on Feb. 5, which said “it shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.”
The IBA did not respond to a request for comment about the IOC executive board’s recommendation or the potential of the sport at the 2028 Games in light of Trump’s order.
World Boxing also did not immediately respond to questions about whether it had been in contact with the Trump administration, or about whether Khelif and Lin would be eligible under its rules. Both Algeria and Chinese Taipei (the Olympic designation for Taiwan) are members of World Boxing.
After the organization was granted provisional recognition last month, Van der Vorst called the topic of gender eligibility “a complicated matter.”
“At World Boxing, we put the interests of boxers first, and the safety of athletes is absolutely paramount,” he said at the time. He added: “We have established a working group of our medical committee, which is in the process of developing a policy on sex, age, and weight.”
The standing of that policy is also not clear.
Gender equality is expected to be a major focus of the election for the incoming IOC president who will be replacing Bach, who is finishing his second four-year term this week. The election will be contested between seven candidates and is scheduled for March 18-21 in Greece.
(Photo: James Chance / Getty Images)
