OpEd: Boxing at Stormy Crossroads

(ATR) In 2006 I flew into a maelstrom in Santo Domingo. It wasn’t a hurricane striking the Dominican Republic that November weekend, but a storm nonetheless. Hunkered down for the tempest at a highrise hotel were hundreds of boxing leaders from around the world. It was the epicenter of the tumult.

They were there to elect a president for AIBA, the Olympic boxing federation, which was literally on the ropes. Bad judging and other corruption such as bribery of the officials had placed the federation on the IOC watchlist. Without a radical change in reputation, boxing was headed for a TKO from the Olympics.

Delegates to the AIBA Congress could choose Anwar Chowdhry, the Pakistani who had led the Federation for two decades, 83 years old. Chowdhry was widely viewed as what was wrong with boxing.

His challenger was CK Wu from Chinese Taipei, IOC member and -- a decade earlier -- a member of the AIBA executive. Wu, then 62, came to Santo Domingo as the reform candidate who would make sure boxing remained part of the Olympic Games.

I had never seen or heard anything like the noise, chaos and confusion of those two days in Santo Domingo. Tensions were high. Suspicious looking characters seemed everywhere. The morning of the vote, the delegate from Mali who had been missing for a day was located. Hotel staff found his body at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Police say the man had thousands in cash in his coat pockets. The crime is still unsolved.

Amid such mayhem Chowdhry and Wu squared off in a hotel ballroom. With a huge crowd of onlookers and seconds -- it is boxing after all -- AIBA controlled who got a paddle to vote by collecting the passports of certified delegates. The pile of a couple hundred passports from around the world at the unguarded entrance to the ballroom seemed like it might provoke a crime of opportunity. Fortunately it did not.

More than two hours of procedural banter and shouting led up to the vote cast by paper ballot. Counting was in full view of the tense crowd. It was tallied vote by vote, hashmarks crossed out for every five votes.

When it was over, AIBA had a new president in CK Wu by a four vote margin.

Now 11 years later, it looks like AIBA is taking some savage blows from another raging storm.

While Wu managed to move the needle out of the danger zone in the first years of his presidency, it looks like it’s headed back into the red as his third term heads to a final year.

Along with Ho Kim as executive director, the Korean sport consultant who had managed the presidential campaign, Wu oversaw unneeded overhaul of the referee and judging system for Olympic boxing. Wu assembled an executive committee that eventually was totally absent members elected during the reign of Chowdhry.

While restoring a sense of order to Olympic boxing, within a couple of years Wu embarked on a program of expansion for AIBA into the realm of professional boxing. The creation of the World Series of Boxing was the first step along with other enterprises, the APB, the Association of Professional Boxing and the Boxing Marketing Arm, a now bankrupted firm.

Financial pressures mounted on the federation to keep these ventures going. A $10 million loan from n Azerbaijan company in 2010 was the first controversial step. Along with that money came suspicions that it was intended to help Azerbaijan win a gold medal at the Olympic Games. Wu has steadfastly denied the allegation but it’s led to uncomfortable reporting by international media.

Then the solidarity that once bound Wu and Ho Kim somehow shattered. Wu fired Kim in 2015, alleging the staff was ready to revolt against the executive director. Kim has maintained that Wu failed to heed the dangers of the loan from Azerbaijan and ignored requests that it be paid back.

Kim documented his anger against his former boss last weekend in a pointed statement issued to Around the Rings. For the first time since his firing he expressed anger and embarrassment for giving his trust to Wu. It definitely was a bridge burning moment.

But morethan a dispute between Wu and Kim, real questions have emerged about the financial viability of the federation in the face of what are reported to be immediate demands for repayment of the Azeri loan.

Further compounding the financial strains on AIBA is the status of a $19 million investment made by a Chinese businessman and devotee of boxing. The investor, Di Wu, supposedly wants his money back after being kicked off the federation executive committee and seeing his money go down the drain of the bankruptcy of the Boxing Marketing Arm.

Ho Kim wasn’t the only departure from the Federation headquarters. Financial department leaders have left. A report on AIBA finances and the Azerbaijan loan by the consultant PWC was leaked to the media by headquarters staff last year. Federation staff warned media not to divulge the confidential contents of the report, but regardless the word was out that AIBA had problems hardly the doing of Ho Kim acting alone.

The IOC took the temporary measure late in 2016 of suspending payments to the federation from its share of revenues from the Olympic Games. In the case of boxing, the IOC distributes about $16 million every four years. The payments have since been restored.

After nearly two years of controversy and confusing accounts of how money was loaned and what it was to pay for, this week the executive committeeof the federation apparently has heard enough. The committee that once rubberstamped the expansion of AIBA into unprofitable ventures is now demanding answers. The EC voted in favor of ordering a vote of confidence for Wu later this year at an extraordinary Congress with all 201 member associations participating.

Unfortunately for CK Wu, the financial pressures are just one of the fissures that are opening up at the boxing federation.

Reliable sources say that François Carrard, the Lausanne lawyer and former director general at the IOC, has quit his post as head of the federation’s ethics commission. With transparency ebbing, the organization has failed to respond to repeated questions about Carrard’s status. Nor has much been proffered to the media from the closed door EC meeting in Moscow.

The federation appears to be on a collision course with the IOC. The Ec is said to have failed to remove two weight classes from the men’s Olympic competition to make way for two more female classes. The IOC requested the change.

Wu pushed a decision by AIBA to eliminate headgear from Olympic boxing that is provoking medical questions. Wu insists that the banishment of headgear helps prevent concussions. The evidence may not bear that out.

And in the aftermath of the debacle over judging at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro where Wu fired dozens of referees and judges, there seems to be little clarity about what’s happened since then to regain confidence in results at the Olympics.

Just like 2006, a cyclone of questions and concerns swirls again around Olympic boxing and Federation AIBA. Once again a president seems to be pushing back against a pelting rain of allegations and accusations.

Is the federation about to be blown away by the winds of bankruptcy? Will the IOC tolerate resistance to change from a federation that’s proven to be a problem before? Are the federation leaders who have stood by for the past 10 years as this new crisis bloomed ready to take responsibility?

For CK Wu, a man who seems not to have an unkind or uncaring cell in his body, the contradictions that suggest revenge and malfeasance are hard to reconcile.

Wu has already served nearly 3 terms in office and is rumored to be launching a bid for a fourth next year. His disgraced predecessor was kicked out after five terms. Is Wu trying to match that dubious record?

Once the savior for Olympic boxing, Wu is again at the center of a crisis for the sport. Whether he is the problem or the solution is something that his colleagues at AIBA must carefully decide.

But here’s hoping that the election they hold later this year is open, honest and good-spirited, not like the ugly storm that ushered in the CK Wu presidency. The world's Olympic boxers need their federation to do right for them.

Written by Ed Hula.For general comments or questions, click here