Boxing at the 2020 Summer Olympics

The five years between the Rio and Tokyo Games had been incredibly difficult for the sport of boxing and especially for the International Boxing Association (also known under the acronym AIBA). President Wu Ching-kuo resigned in late 2017 after allegations of financial mismanagement and accounting irregularities were made against him by the governing body’s Executive Committee. His successor, Gafur Rakhimov, was an equally controversial choice. While never convicted of any crime, he was accused of being one of Uzbekistan’s “leading criminals” with “links to the heroin and cocaine trade” by the US Treasury.

With allegations mounting the IOC voted to suspend its recognition of AIBA as the governing body for the sport in June 2019 and stripped AIBA of any practical involvement in the Olympic Games. Through a task force chaired by Morinari Watanabe, President of the International Gymnastics Federation, the IOC took direct oversight of the qualification events and the boxing tournament at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Canadian lawyer Professor Richard McLaren was appointed to conduct a three-stage investigation on the conduct of AIBA since 2012. In September 2021 the first stage of the report was published which stated that “Professor McLaren and his team have identified a system for manipulating the results of bouts at the Rio 2016 boxing tournament.”

There were drastic changes in the Olympic schedule. Men’s boxing was reduced from 10 weight classes to eight with light-flyweight, light-welterweight, and bantamweight being dropped although the returning featherweight division was merely a slightly modified bantamweight division under a different name. On the women’s side featherweight and welterweight were added to the Olympic programme.

The COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the qualification for Tokyo. Although the African and Asia/Oceania qualifying tournaments were completed before the pandemic shut down world sport, European qualification was halted after three days of the London tournament and not resumed until 14 months later in France. The Pan-American and last chance World qualifiers were not as lucky and had to be abandoned with the Olympic places instead being allocated via regional and global world rankings respectively.

Cuba topped the boxing medal table in Tokyo, for the first time since 2004, despite their refusal to attempt to send women to the Games in this sport. Three of their gold medallists repeated their achievements of 2016.

The most memorable moment of the Tokyo Games came when world champion Ukrainian Oleksandr Khyzhniak, in the midst of dominating his opponent Hebert Conceicão throughout the men’s middleweight final, suddenly lost concentration and was floored by the Brazilian. Khyzhniak got back to his feet but was so unsteady that the referee had no choice but to end the fight.

The general view was that Watanabe had presided over a boxing tournament that, for once, was relatively free of the controversies that had dogged the Olympic Games for decades and was widely praised for his efforts.