The International Olympic Committee (IOC) on Friday said that it has frozen relations with the International Boxing Association (AIBA) and refused to accredit interim president Gafur Rakhimov for the Youth Olympics.
The IOC executive board, meeting in Buenos Aires ahead of yesterday’s start of the youth games, which include boxing, issued a statement saying they were “freezing contacts.”
“The IOC is freezing all contacts with AIBA, except the ones on the working level which are necessary to implement the respective IOC decisions — for this reason, Rakhimov will not be accredited for the Youth Olympic Games,” it said.
This is only the latest statement in a week in which the IOC has made clear that it is prepared to kick the AIBA out of the Olympic movement and remove boxing from the 2020 Tokyo Games if “governance problems” were not resolved.
“These include the circumstances of the establishment of the election list,” the IOC said on Wednesday.
The committee did not mention any names, but Rakhimov, who has been linked to organized crime by the US Department of the Treasury, appears to be a problem.
In February, the IOC said it was worried by the nomination of the Uzbek businessman for the AIBA’s interim presidency, which he still took over.
That position is set to be confirmed at the AIBA congress in Moscow from Nov. 2 to 3. Rakhimov faced a challenger, Serik Konakbayev, a Kazakh who won an Olympic silver medal in Moscow in 1980.
However, on Wednesday, AIBA announced that Rakhimov is now the only candidate for the presidency. Since the AIBA constitution specifies that if there is only one candidate, there is no vote, Rakhimov is to become president.
In attempting to force change at the AIBA, the IOC had already suspended financial contributions to the association.
The IOC has also said that while boxing will be part of the competition at the Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires, it had “required independent oversight of the refereeing and judging ... to protect the integrity of the competition and ensure the protection of the athletes.”
At the end of August, IOC chief ethics and compliance officer Paquerette Girard Zappelli broke with convention and wrote a letter to Rakhimov suggesting not to stand for the AIBA presidency.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier