Gender wars and Gazprom vol-au-vents: how boxing ended up in a mess

It has been quite the week for Chris Roberts, the former British army officer who leads the day-to-day running of the International Boxing Association. “Didn’t go the way I expected to,” says the IBA’s secretary general, ruefully.

When Roberts and his Russian boss, Umar Kremlev, president of the IBA, decided to hold a press conference in Paris on Monday, the plan had been to publish the gender test results of the boxers Imane Khelif, of Algeria, and Lin Yu-ting from Taiwan (competing as Chinese Taipei). The Olympic medal-winning performances of the two fighters have been the controversy of the Games.

Banned last year by the IBA after gender tests had found them ineligible to compete, the fighters’ progress, including a bout involving Khelif that was abandoned after 46 seconds by Italy’s Angela Carini (“I’ve never been hit so hard in my life,” she said), has stirred up strong emotions.

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It has also fed some fresh bite into the continuing slug-fest between the IBA and the International Olympic Committee over the latter’s decision last year to strip the former of its status as amateur boxing’s world governing body over concerns over how it is financed and governed.

The purpose of the press conference was to double down on the IBA’s claim that the IOC, led by Kremlev’s bete noire, Thomas Bach, is a danger to women’s boxing, among other things.

It had been believed making public the chromosome tests of the boxers would place serious pressure on the Olympic organisers’ position that the fighters were eligible having been registered as women at birth and holding passports as such. But that morning legal letters came in from the Algerian and Taiwanese organising committees warning them not to breach non-disclosure agreements.

Kremlev privately argued they should go ahead anyway. Roberts and the lawyers counselled against. The press conference turned into a farce as Kremlev, appearing from Moscow via video-call, filled the time with long diatribes (only partially translated) about the Games’ opening ceremony (“Something horrible for all Christians and Muslims around the world”), complete with a series of wild accusations and personal insults about Bach, a German former Olympic individual foil champion.

With nothing meaningful coming from the IBA, the journalists gathered in the humid Salon des Miroirs, a function room in central Paris, inevitably started asking questions of the organisation’s own health as a body, not least whether it was continuing to receive sponsorship from Gazprom, the Russian state-owned gas company that is under international sanctions.

At the time Roberts declined to say – but that was then. “We are still in receipt of funding from Gazprom,” he told the Observer. The funds allowed the IBA to put up prize money for events, to support boxing around the world, Roberts said. Then there was the catering put on for the journalists in the Salon des Miroirs. “The IBA paid for all that. I wonder if the journalists enjoyed Gazprom vol-au-vents. Actually that came from our other sponsor so that’s all good.”

The IOC has been quick to jump on the IBA’s discomfort, suggesting the press conference highlighted why it was not fit to be a governing body. What is certainly the case is that boxing is in a mess and, as it stands, its presence at the next Olympics in Los Angeles is in doubt.

The genesis of this crisis is the extraordinary levels of corruption uncovered in a report commissioned by the IBA into its own officials after a series of media investigations, including by the Guardian. Prof Richard McLaren, a lawyer who helped investigate allegations of state-sponsored doping in Russian sports, was asked by the IBA to look into the claims. He published his report in 2021. “It was a corrupt mess,” he told the Observer from his office in Canada. And it went way back to the 1990s.

Some of the facts he uncovered barely seem believable. Judges were routinely bribed or threatened to award fights this way or that and it went all the way to the top. Before the London Olympics, the then president of what was then called Aiba, Wu Ching‑kuo, ordered that Azerbaijan should not win any medals as it had been leaked to the BBC that the organisation had received a $10m investment loan from the country and it would not look good.

McLaren said the renamed IBA had, since Wu’s departure, worked to clear up the mess. New procedures on the selection and vetting of judges and referees were introduced, along with rules about access around event arenas.

Roberts said they thought good progress had been made to overturn a suspension of IBA’s status. “But the IOC kept changing the goalposts,” he said. McLaren said that while the IBA was “not perfect” he had been disappointed in the decision by the IOC in 2023 to strip it formally of governing status. The IOC points to a court of arbitration for sport backing its view that insufficient progress had been made in financial transparency, the selection of referees and judges and institutional culture.

It is difficult to believe the Russian leadership of the IBA at a time when Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has turned that country into a pariah state is not also a major factor in the IBA’s predicament. McLaren said a “personality clash” between Bach and Kremlev, the genesis of which is unclear, had also fed into the mix.

A new organisation called World Boxing is seeking, with the IOC’s backing, to replace the IBA. It argues that national federations and the boxers should switch over their support to it as only with a new governing body will it be possible to avoid the disaster of boxing going missing from the LA Games. One challenge will be to convince the boxers it can offer the sort of cash prizes the Gazprom-supported IBA is dishing out, said McLaren. The IBA also has a hold on the vast majority of accredited referees and judges.

Does it all matter? McLaren believes it does. The Games inspire people to get into the sport, he said. “A lot of people don’t realise that boxing is a very important sport for youngsters who don’t have the equipment required for cycling, fencing, sailing,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many people I talk to who have said how if it weren’t for boxing they would be in jail.”