Boxing under Olympic ban threat after alleged fraudster takes charge

LAUSANNE: If your objective was to see your sport barred from the Olympics, naming a man labelled “one of Uzbekistan’s leading criminals” as federation president might not be a bad strategy.

Thanks to boxing’s everinteresting governing body, AIBA, we may soon see if the gambit works.

AIBA, of course, is not actually trying to have boxing excluded from the 2020 Games in Tokyo despite naming as its head a man linked to the heroin trade.

AIBA executives insist that with new leadership installed the federation has moved past the scandal-plagued era of ousted president Wu Ching-Kuo, whom they accuse of bringing AIBA to the brink of financial collapse.

The International Olympic Committee is not convinced that things are quite so rosy.

Shortly after Gafur Rakhimov was named acting AIBA president in January, IOC chief Thomas Bach said he was “extremely worried” about the federation’s governance and “extremely concerned” about Rakhimov’s appointment.

In December, the United States Treasury Department designated the 66-year- old Uzbek national as a key collaborator of the transnational criminal group Thieves- in- Law, which Washington says “originated in Stalinist prison camps”.

After beginning his career in extortion and car theft, Rakhimov has become “one of Uzbekistan’s leadingcriminalsandanimportant person involved in the heroin trade,” according to a Treasury Department statement.

His US assets have been frozen and American businesses are barred from dealing with him.

AIBA wa s in the IOC’s crosshairs before Rakhimov was named president at a Congress in Dubai.

That scrutiny was heightened amid the bizarre events that led to Wu’s removal , which included petitions in Swiss court, employees locked out of AIBA’s office in Lausanne and claims that millions of dollars had gone missing.

But in a Feb 4 statement titled “IOC Executive Board dissatisfied with AIBA”, Olympic bosses upped the pressure and gave the federation until April 30 to clarify its financial situation and governance.

The IOC has cut off all payments to AIBA, opened an ethics investigation and underscored that it retained the right to exclude boxing from this year’s Youth Games in Buenos Aires and Tokyo 2020. If barred from Tokyo, it would mark boxing’s first absence from the Olympics since Stockholm 1912, when the sport was banned in Sweden.

For Pat Fiacco, a long-standing AIBA insider and key player in Wu’s ouster, the federation is basking in “a time of renewal.”

“The situation at AIBA is very positive, full of energy and optimism as we work hard to improve its governance, finances and management,” he told AFP.

Because Rakhimov was the senior vice president when Wu departed, appointing him acting chief was consistent with AIBA rules.

But F i a c c o d i smi s s e d suggestions that the Uzbek should be sidelined in order to pacify the IOC. Rakhimov “has the full support and confidence of the AIBA Executive Committee,” said Fiacco, the former mayor of Canada’s city of Regina. — AFP