World News

Banned governing body that’s fueling outcry on Olympic boxers has Russian ties and troubled history

It was hard not to copy and paste the whole article, I did my best to pull excerpts and bold important portions.

Summary- Long story short, the disqualifications were done in a tournament run by an organization banned by the Olympics. Both boxers participated in tournaments run by this organization with no issues for the last several years. The organization hasn't said why they were disqualified. The man saying the weird trans woman claims is the leader of the organization. He's a friend of Putin and described as a drug trafficker. The disqualification for Khelif happened after she beat the previously undefeated Russian boxer Amineva 3 days post fight.

Strangely, nobody who's up in arms about the weird claim has looked into who made it, when, the context around it, or an explanation for it. They just ate it up.

Nearly 17 months ago in New Delhi, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was disqualified from the International Boxing Association’s world championships three days after she won an early-round bout with Azalia Amineva, a previously unbeaten Russian prospect.

The disqualification meant Amineva’s official record was perfect again.

The governing body claimed the fighters had failed unspecified eligibility tests

The BA’s decision last year — and its curious timing, particularly related to Amineva’s loss to Khelif — would have raised warning signs around the sports world if more people cared about amateur boxing, or even knew more about the IBA under president Umar Kremlev of Russia.

The entire boxing world has already learned to expect almost anything from the Russian-dominated governing body that was given the unprecedented punishment of being permanently banned from the Olympics last year. In fact, it hasn’t run an Olympic boxing tournament since the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016.

The International Olympic Committee has decades of mostly bad history with the beleaguered governing body previously known for decades as AIBA, and it has exasperatedly begged non-boxing people to pay attention to the sole source of the allegations against Khelif and Lin.

The IOC had stuck with the previous incarnation of boxing’s governing body through decades of judging scandals, bizarre leadership decisions and innumerable financial misdeeds while it presided over Olympic boxing tournaments.

Not until 2019, nearly two years after the organization elected a president with what U.S. officials call deep ties to Russian organized crime and heroin trafficking, did the IOC finally banish the perpetually troubled group.

The IOC permanently stripped the IBA’s Olympic credentials and ran the past two Olympic boxing tournaments with a task force.

Kremlev also has made additional allegations about the gender of both fighters without providing proof, and people across the world have accepted his word.

So much is unclear about the IBA’s decision to ban Khelif and Lin last year, particularly since both had competed in IBA events for years without problems.

It’s even possible the decision was actually made according to the results of legitimate tests conducted over two years, as the IBA says — but the IBA has refused to officially say what, when or where these tests were administered, who evaluated them, or what the results meant.

The IOC has said boxing will be dropped from the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics unless the sport lines up behind a new governing body