OFI not considering 2024 boycott amid potential presence of Russian and Belarussian athletes

Olympic Federation of Ireland (OFI) president Sarah Keane expressed her confidence that boxing will be part of the programme in Paris.

Wed, 08 Mar, 2023 - 07:12

Brendan O'Brien

Olympic Federation of Ireland (OFI) president Sarah Keane has insisted that they will not be considering any boycott of the 2024 Olympic Games over the possible presence of Russian and Belarussian athletes.

And Keane has also expressed her confidence that boxing, which has provided this country with the majority of its Olympic medals, will be part of the programme in Paris next year despite the controversy currently tearing the sport apart.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and International Boxing Association (IBA) are at loggerheads over the latter’s governance issues with the former announcing last year that the boxing body would not run qualifying events for the 2024 Games.

The IOC has already overseen boxing at the delayed Tokyo Olympics after the match-fixing disaster that was Rio 2016. It plans to do so again come Paris but the sport is, at it stands, absent from the list of sports due to appear come Los Angeles in 2028.

Added to this now is a statement issued to the Washington Post last week stating that the recent IBA Congress had shown that the body was concerned only in its own power and had “no real interest” in the sport or the athletes.

It expressed concern that the IBA had backed Umar Kremlev to remain as president in lieu of an election and claimed that this would see it continue to depend on a company which is “largely controlled” by the Russian government.

All of this has led the IOC to consider its options, the statement continued, and these may include the “cancellation of boxing” for the Paris Games.

This is bad news for the sport and terrible news for the Irish Olympic movement which has sourced over half (18 of 35) of its medals at the Games inside the ring. And it isn’t even the only dark cloud on that horizon.

It looks highly likely that lightweight rowing will be stripped from the programme for the LA event five years from now. Between them, boxing and lightweight rowing have been responsible for 73% of Ireland’s medal haul since Beijing in 2008.

“We are confident that boxing will be at the Olympics in 2024, (there has been) a massive commitment from the IOC,” said Keane. “The challenge is whether they are going to have the people required to run the tournament.

“Ultimately, they oversee the running of the Olympic games and are not supposed to be running events (between) the Olympic games, and they thought they would just be doing this for Tokyo.”

Ireland is among a small but significant number of countries that have pulled out of the upcoming men’s and women’s World Championship events being run by the IBA and the Irish governing body is also part of the Common Cause Alliance.

The CCA is a loose collection of boxing federations which the OFI estimates numbers up to 25 members, and almost all of which are ‘western’ democracies, but there is far less support for this movement in other parts of the world.

The IOC-run Olympic qualifiers for Europe are three months away but the IBA has attempted to muddy the waters by announcing their own pathway to Paris. Keane dismissed this as “parallel universe stuff, Walty Mitty stuff”.

The OFI president stressed that Irish boxers’ Olympic hopes were in no way dented by the Irish Athletic Boxing Association’s (IABA) decision not to send boxers to the Worlds and welcomed the national body’s stance and decision to look at the bigger, long-term picture.

What is clear is that this could all get worse before anything gets better.

“There is a concern that things will get dirtier and dirtier, particularly if something happens later in the year. One can understand that national federations have a concern if they go against the current international movement. Where is their pathway?”

Another area of contention is the IOC’s plan to facilitate the presence of Russian and Belorussian athletes in Paris, and at the 2026 Winter Games in Milan, despite the ongoing war in Ukraine.

The IOC has stressed that it would continue sanctions against Russian and Belarussian state and government officials and prohibit sporting events organised by their country’s federation but the move on athletes, made in late January, has created concern.

Ireland's Minister of State for Sport and Physical Education, Thomas Byrne, recently joined 33 other sport ministers from Europe, North America, Asia and Oceania, in signing a statement calling for the IOC to reconsider.

The OFI have held discussions with the minister who has confirmed that he will not interfere with the autonomy of the Irish Olympic body, or do anything that is “anti-athlete”, and Keane is resolute in their own stance.

“Ireland will not be boycotting the 2024 Olympic Games. Full stop. If our athletes decide they don’t want to go, that is up to them, but we will not be boycotting. The only people who lose out of that is the athletes and teams.”