Zeina Nassar is a German boxer and national champion. She is a trailblazer. Two years ago, at her urging, AIBA, the international boxing federation, changed its rules to allow female fighters to box wearing the hijab, the headscarf worn by Muslim women.
“We are all responsible,” Nassar said Monday at a wide-ranging news conference organized Monday by AIBA in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Olympic capital, “for a change.”
The changes at issue Monday were those AIBA has furiously been implementing for the past months under Russia’s Umar Kremlev, elected president last December. The aim: being back as the sport’s governing body for the Paris Games in 2024. An IOC task force overseen by gymnastics president Morinari Watanabe will run the boxing tournament at the Tokyo Olympics.
Kremlev has been outspoken about instilling an AIBA culture rooted in transparency and in globally recognized best practices of good governance; putting the federation on solid financial ground; identifying past and current instances of corruption in and out of the ring, in particular in AIBA financial dealings; and, as if all that wasn’t enough, fixing the seemingly eternal problem of badly judged or officiated— the skeptic would say fixed — fights.
It’s little wonder boxing’s place on the Olympic program is threatened.
German boxer Zeina Nassar at Monday’s news conference in Lausanne // AIBA
Umar Kremlev, elected president six months ago, at Monday’s news conference // AIBA
But, as Kremlev said Monday, “It’s my personal opinion that boxing is a flagship sport,” and in this regard he is 100 percent correct, with an Olympic tradition and heritage second to none, Cassius Clay in Rome in 1960 and more. Boxing has been on the Olympic program since Antwerp in 1920, 101 years ago.
And Kremlev is exceptionally forthright about what is also what:
“We all know that what happened before us,” he said, speaking in Russian through a translator. “It was a major, to put it bluntly, crime. But we are not only doing away with our past. We have our vision.”
The obvious question: is that enough?
AIBA is facing fundamental and simultaneous challenges.
It must confront a daunting (read: harsh) reality, with which it is dealing.
And perceptions, which are maybe that much more vexing.
And — this is perhaps the most difficult proposition — Kremlev and secretary general Istvan Kovacs in particular must now go about developing relationships within Olympic circles to position themselves and AIBA.
To touch on the most obvious of the perception issues first:
Kremlev is Russian.
That comes bundled with all matter of stereotype and preconception. Fair? Unfair? Doesn’t matter. It is what it is.
Reality: Russia remains a key Olympic player. The president of the Russian federation is a key Olympic influencer. Kremlev and the president of the Russian federation are well known to each other, and it’s a considerable question whether it would make sense to remove from the Olympic program a sport that in recent years in particular has produced an extraordinary number of medalists from Russia or its former satellite nations.
In 23 years of covering the Olympic movement, there has never been an AIBA news conference like the one that went down Monday at one of Lausanne’s two premier hotels, the Beau Rivage. It featured not only Kremlev and Kovacs but the likes of Roy Jones Jr., the superstar American boxer who is nearly universally understood to have been robbed of Olympic gold at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Roy Jones Jr. // AIBA
Jones said he was on hand to lend support for AIBA reforms.
“Man, it was the worst feeling,” he said of being robbed in 1988, adding that he still feels “sour” about it and doesn’t want anyone anywhere to feel his pain.
“My job,” he said, referring to Kremlev, “is to go side by side with my brother here.”
Also on hand: Ulrich Haas, a University of Zurich law professor who, among other matters, has led working groups on governance for the World Anti-Doping Agency. He now chairs a five-person panel with a mandate to do the same for AIBA, saying the “benchmark” would be standards developed by what’s called IPACS, the International Partnership Against Corruption in Sport. IPACS was launched four years ago at an IOC International Forum on Sport Integrity.
Also appearing: Canadian professor Richard McLaren, considered the gold standard after investigations into doping and corruption at the Sochi Games and into the International Weightlifting Federation. He said via videoconference that AIBA had retained him June 10 to conduct a far-reaching — and, he stressed, independent — investigation, with a first focus on the notorious judging at the Rio 2016 Games and, later, a look at AIBA’s management from 2006 onward.
None of the Rio judges and referees are allowed to officiate in Tokyo.
McLaren said Monday he intends to deliver an initial report by the end of August.
The goal, McLaren said, was to return “integrity to your sport.”
AIBA announced recently the repayment of an eight-figure loan that had been taken out from a company in Azerbaijan during the tenure of a former president, C.K. Wu; that money was aimed at creating a team-based professional league called the World Series of Boxing. AiBA also said it had signed a two-year sponsorship deal with Gazprom, the Russian energy concern. For those tempted to be critical of Gazprom solely because it is Russian — Gazprom is also a leading sponsor of the European soccer entity UEFA.
There is zero question these are all constructive steps. Especially retaining McLaren and Haas.
What AIBA needs urgently is the work those two produce.
And then it needs a break.
Whether it deserves one or not.
It may seem unfair — given that AIBA has literally nothing to do with the Tokyo competition — but what Olympic boxing needs at the Games this summer is, literally and figuratively, nothing.
That is, no scandal.
If calm can hold, then AIBA ought to do as soon as possible what judo has done under the leadership of international federation president Marius Vizer. Each year, all judo referees and officials gather together to go over the sport’s rules. This builds not only familiarity with the rules but also a sense of collegiality.
This is how federations build winning culture.
But there is a long way to go. For instance, the many national federation officials who in late 2018 in a landslide elected Uzbekistan’s Gafur Rakhimov AIBA president (he had become interim president 10 months earlier) — how many of them are still in their positions? What kind of culture change is it going to take to get those national presidents or their cronies out of the picture? And how long?
Rakhimov formally resigned in July 2019; he had stepped aside four months beforehand. The United States Treasury Department — in an allegation Rakhimov has vigorously contested — called him “one of Uzbekistan’s leading criminals.” His involvement with AIBA led the IOC to suspend AIBA’s recognition and keep it out of any involvement in the boxing competition at the Tokyo Games.
To answer the question about culture change at the national federation level: the Haas report needs to focus not just on governance at AIBA itself but on all those national federations. The sooner that report gets out, the sooner AIBA can effect leverage to get the Rakhimov bandwagoners out. That’s essential.
Further, Monday’s news conference ought to be the last one for a very long time. It did what it had to do — tell the world that six months have passed, and the changes that Kremlev has asserted are underway are in progress.
Now — will he, and AIBA, get time, and a chance?
There remain considerable skeptics.
Particularly the most important ones.
To be blunt, almost no one inside IOC leadership knows the first thing about Kremlev, or his back story — for instance, his years growing up in an orphanage.
For that matter, virtually no one in AIBA’s top leadership circles knows anyone at the highest levels of the IOC.
In the same way that the-then U.S. Olympic Committee leadership worked assiduously in the years after Chicago got punched out in 2009 for the 2016 Games to build relationships, that’s the task ahead for Kremlev, Kovacs and others within AIBA.
It was the same for wrestling after that sport almost got kicked out of the progam in 2013. Serbia’s Nenad Lalovic had to learn who was who in the Olympic landscape. He’s now on the IOC executive board.
“We have to put a full stop to the past,” Kremlev said Monday. “The rest is to be decided by the IOC. The most important thing is to interact with them.”