Olympics-Boxing's inclusion in LA 2028 Games to be decided next year - IOC's Bach

By Karolos Grohmann

PARIS (Reuters) -A decision on boxing's inclusion at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics has to be made in 2025, International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach said on Friday.

The boxing competition at the Paris Olympics is being run by the IOC after it stripped the International Boxing Association (IBA) of recognition last year over its failure to implement reforms on governance and finance.

The IOC has not included the sport on the LA 2028 programme yet and has urged national boxing federations to create a new global boxing body or risk missing out on the Olympics in four years' time.

"During the course of next year, as soon as possible. But we cannot wait longer than the end of next year," Bach told a press conference when asked when the IOC would decide on the sport's inclusion or not for Los Angeles. The Olympic body has said it will not run the boxing competition at the next Games.

A new organisation called World Boxing was launched in 2023 and currently has 37 members, still far fewer than the IBA, but it is not recognised by the IOC.

The IOC suspended the IBA 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.

The IOC and IBA have been at loggerheads for days during the Paris Olympics over the participation of two female boxers, Algeria's Imane Khelif and Taiwanese Lin Yu-ting.

The IBA banned them midway through last year's World Championships following a chromosome test, citing gender ineligibility, but the IOC has allowed them both to compete, saying they are women.

(Reporting by Karolos Grohmann, writing by Julien Pretot and Karolos Grohmann; Editing by Clare Fallon)