Olympic boxing can be saved – Vargas

PARIS — An Olympic Games without boxing would be a big blow to the Philippines. It’s like a cake without icing or kare-kare without bagoong.

Boxing in the 2028 Los Angeles Games is in the balance, but Association of Boxing Alliances in the Philippines chairman Ricky Vargas is hopeful it can be saved through World Boxing.

“Sabi ng IOC kung makabuo kami ng 50 (membership), okay na kami. So far we have 51, and we’re to get the ASBC (Asian Boxing Confederation,” said Vargas, a member of the World Boxing executive board.

“I had a meeting with the ASBC president in Bangkok. Sasama daw sila sa amin,” Vargas added.

For the Philippines, it’s hard to imagine an Olympics minus the sport of boxing.

Consider the sport accounting for no less than 10 of 18 medals the country has won in 23 Olympics or in a century of participation in the summer spectacle starting in 1924.

Through Nesthy Petecio, Carlo Paalam, Eumir Marcial and Aira Villegas, the ABAP (Association of Boxing Alliances in the Philippines) team strung up five medals in the last two editions in Tokyo in 2021 and here in Paris now.

The other Philippine boxing medals were courtesy of Jose Villanueva in 1932, Anthony Villanueva in 1964, Leopoldo Serantes in 1988, Roel Velasco in 1992 and Onyok Velasco in 1996.

But then here now is the prospect of the scrapping of boxing in the next Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee stripped the International Boxing Association (IBA) of recognition last year over its failure to implement reforms on governance and finance, and the Olympic body has not included the sport on the Los Angeles 2028 program yet.

“We would love to see boxing, we want to see boxing on the program in LA. Now it is up to the boxing community to organize themselves for the sport and for the athletes,” IOC spokesperson Mark Adams said in a press conference here.

World Boxing is a new organization launched in 2023 but has yet to gain the IOC recognition.

The IOC and IBA have been at loggerheads for days here over the participation of two female boxers, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s 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.

Relations between the IOC and IBA have been tense for years and soured further following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with the IBA run by Russian Umar Kremlev.

The IOC has run the boxing competitions without the IBA at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and in Paris but will not do so in Los Angeles. “We are not a federation and we desperately need a federation to run boxing,” Adams said.