The International Olympic Committee executive board on Monday (March 17) recommended the inclusion of boxing in the Los Angeles 2028 summer Olympics, ending a years-long saga regarding the sport’s Olympic future.

The IOC last month granted provisional recognition to World Boxing in a major step towards the sport’s inclusion in the 2028 Olympics.

The recommendation will now be put to a vote at the IOC session in Greece this week and is expected to pass easily, with boxing among the popular Olympic sports.

The boxing competition at the Paris 2024 Games was run by the IOC after it had stripped the International Boxing Association of recognition in 2023 over its failure to implement reforms on governance and finance.

The IOC had not included the sport on the initial LA 2028 programme, having urged national boxing federations to create a new global boxing body. World Boxing, now with more than 80 national federations as members, was launched in 2023.

The IOC said only athletes whose national federations were members of World Boxing by the time of the start of the qualification events for the 2028 Olympics could take part in Los Angeles.

The IOC suspended the IBA, run by Russian businessman Umar Kremlev, in 2019 over governance, finance, refereeing and ethical issues and did not involve it in running the boxing events at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, before stripping it of recognition in 2023, an extremely rare move by the IOC.

Bach said Russia was welcome to return to the Olympics, but must first follow the rules of the Olympic Charter.

The IOC banned the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) for recognising regional Olympic councils for Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine that Russia claims as its own – Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

(Reuters)