Boxing, IOC Review Progress

(ATR) Olympic boxing federation AIBA is making progress on a range of issues raised by the IOC says executive director Tom Virgets.

The IOC has given the federation an April 25 deadline to respond to its concerns or face the prospect of being knocked out of the Tokyo Olympics.

Virgets met with IOC Sports Director Kit McConnell and IOC Summer Sports director David Luckes in Bangkok for about an hour Wednesday on the sidelines of the SportAccord convention. Virgets was accompanied by AIBA Executive Committee member Pat Fiacco.

Virgets, who started this month at AIBA headquarters in Lausanne, is a former athletics director at the U.S. Naval Academy and once served as president of USA Boxing.

"We gave them a status report. They seemed satisfied with the movement we are making and that we are going to meet our deadline," Virgets tells Around the Rings about the meeting with the IOC.

"If you look at best practices of governance, you can see we are moving in the right direction. We are implementing all of the changes needed for standards of best practices," says Virgets, admitting some may take longer than others to enact.

The IOC Executive Board, led by President Thomas Bach, told the federation in February that an array of issues must be addressed to avoid relegation from the Olympics for the sport.

The federation has been dogged by financial questions that could lead to bankruptcy. Sloppy out of competition drug testing does not comply with WADA standards. Referee and judging from Rio 2016 is suspect with every one of the 36 officials suspended.

Virgets says the concerns of the IOC president about interim AIBA president Gafur Rakhimov were not discussed in the Bangkok meeting.

The Uzbek-born Russian businessman has had a long association with the Olympic Council of Asia as well as AIBA. Due to his seniority, Rakhimov took over as interim AIBA president in the wake of the resignation of C.K. Wu. As long as Rakhimov has been an international sports leader, he has also battled reputed links to organized crime in Russia. Rakhimov has never faced charges.

Wu, from Chinese Taipei, had been AIBA president since 2006. He remains one of the most senior IOC members despite resigning from AIBA late in 2017 after claims of mismanagement and financial problems. He is believed to still be the subject of an IOC Ethics Commission inquiry launched over his conduct as AIBA president.

AIBA will elect a new president for a full four year term at its next congress in November.

"Obvously we’ve made some mistakes, but we’re correcting them," says Virgets.

"Our goal is not only to be reputable, but to be one of the sterling governing bodies in the Olympic Movement."

Regardless of AIBA’s issues with the IOC, every one of the 33 federations under the wing of Association of Summer Olympic International Federations will need to watch their p’s and q’s in the future.

ASOIF has adopted a governance review process that takes into account all aspects of the operation and policies of the federations. Those feds which do not meet standards of good governance risk public shaming beginning in 2019.

Reported by Mark Bisson in Bangkok and Ed Hula in Atlanta.