Boxing dropped from Olympic sports, football could follow
Although football has been included in the initial list of sports, IOC members have told The Times the statement stands as a warning
Olympic chiefs have raised the threat of football being dropped from the Games if Fifa pushes ahead with plans for a biennial World Cup reports The Times of London.
The IOC issued a statement relating to football at the 2028 Los Angeles Games, saying it will “continue to monitor the evolution of the international match calendar”. The IOC has also left boxing, modern pentathlon and weightlifting off the initial list of sports for LA 2028, and said they can only be included if they address concerns raised in December.
Although football has been included in the initial list of sports, IOC members have told The Times the statement stands as a warning to Fifa’s president Gianni Infantino that the IOC believes more major football events will impact heavily on the Olympics and other Olympic sports.
Infantino, who is himself an IOC member, has pulled out of a visit to the Beijing Winter Olympics, so he has avoided a face-to-face confrontation with the IOC president, Thomas Bach over the issue.
One IOC member, who asked not to be named, said: “In IOC language the message to Fifa is as clear as it gets: if you want football to remain in the Olympics then drop the biennial World Cup plan.”
Infantino was last week criticised by fans’ groups and football’s equality organisation, Kick It Out, after he suggested that changes to the international calendar such as a biennial World Cup might make Africans less likely to migrate to Europe and risk “probable death” in the Mediterranean Sea.
Boxing’s international federation, AIBA, must demonstrate that it has addressed concerns around the sport’s governance and the integrity of its refereeing and judging processes. It follows an independent investigation last September, which found that officials manipulated matches at the Rio 2016 Games, resulting in some boxers unfairly losing medals.
Weightlifting must show it has addressed the historical issue of doping within the sport, while modern pentathlon has to come up with a replacement discipline to showjumping, which was controversially dropped after incidents involving the mistreatment of a horse at the Tokyo Games last summer.
Kate Allenby, Britain’s bronze medallist at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, who campaigned against the International Modern Pentathlon Union’s (UIPM) decision to drop equestrian events, said athletes “were devastated” that the sport has been dropped. No replacement discipline has so far been confirmed.
“Having only four sports and a question mark for the other is just not credible and we are now currently out of the Olympics,” she told The Times. “It is no surprise there have been calls for a vote of no confidence in the leadership of the UIPM.”
The IOC session in Beijing approved a programme of 28 sports for 2028, with a “strong focus on youth” including skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing. Los Angeles will be able to propose additional sports next year.
The IOC statement added: “Boxing, weightlifting and modern pentathlon may potentially be included in the LA28 Initial Sports Programme by the IOC Session in 2023 if by then the respective international federations have demonstrated to the IOC’s satisfaction that they have satisfactorily addressed the areas specified by the executive board.”
