Local amateur boxers have probably had the worst luck of all Olympic codes over the past several years.
They have been victims of sports administrators both at home and abroad and there’s no guarantee they won’t get kicked in the teeth again between now and the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Phiwokuhle Mnguni, who became the first SA woman to win a Commonwealth Games medal when taking a 57kg bronze at Birmingham 2022, is one of three boxers who will compete at the world championships in Delhi, starting today (Wednesday).
Thandolwethu Mathiba and Lethokuhle Sibisi are the other two who will be pitting their skills against many of the world’s best, but not all.
The International Boxing Association (IBA), the global governing body for open boxing, which has been suspended by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) since 2019, says the showpiece is a qualifier for the Games in France.
The IOC, however, has said the only qualifying tournaments that will count are those that it has endorsed.
The women’s tournament in India and the men’s world championships in Tashkent are not among them.
No South African has ever won a world championship medal, and what a waste it would be if that were to happen without the advantage of qualifying for the Olympics.
The impasse between the IBA and IOC is a serious one, with the possibility that boxing will lose its spot on the Olympic roster from Los Angeles 2028 onwards. There has even been a threat it could get dumped before Paris.
The IBA had issues with fixed fights at Rio 2016 and by 2019 had been suspended by the IOC, which oversaw the running of the boxing tournament at Tokyo 2020.
There are several issues between the IOC and IBA, many of which are political in nature, but one is the international federation’s decision to allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete under their own flags at the women’s and men’s world championships.
This is in contrast to the IOC’s wishes.
No fewer than 11 nations have decided to boycott the championships, including New Zealand. An alternative championships is being arranged in the Netherlands, sparking the IBA to offer funding to athletes from the boycotting countries to attend.
Part of the distrust by the IOC centres on the IBA’s president Umar Kremlev, a reportedly dodgy character who happens to be Russian.
It’s a right royal mess.
For SA’s boxers, however, these issues are only the latest in an even longer saga.
No SA boxers were selected for the SA team to Rio 2016 after the SA Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) refused to accept continental qualification. Two fighters had qualified at the African tournament.
In early 2020 the then administration of the SA National Boxing Organisation (Sanabo) failed to arrange funding on time to send a team to the African Olympic qualifying tournament. This was the same body that had been given a R10m injection by government a few years earlier to uplift the sport.
Even fighters from poorer countries than South Africa, like Lesotho, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Namibia got to compete at the tournament in Dakar, Senegal.
Sanabo got a new administration, but the Covid-19 pandemic that struck soon afterwards knocked out plans for an international qualifying tournament that would have been last-chance saloon for SA’s boxers.
For the second Games in a row there were no SA boxers.
I guess some critics might look at the fact that SA boxers have not won a single Olympic medal since readmission in 1992 and that no fighter has won more than one bout at a single Games. They might ask: what’s the point?
But before isolation boxing was SA’s richest source of silverware with 19 medals.
We are supposed to be good at it and it’s a sport that can help members from the most disadvantaged sectors of society, at least when it’s organised properly.
I made suggestions last week about how to start implementing structures to start pushing this sleeping giant in the right direction.
Mnguni and Simnikiwe Bongco, a 75kg bronze medallist, won SA’s first Commonwealth Games gongs since 2014, suggesting there’s a turnaround happening in the sport locally.
The poor fighters have endured storm after storm and they could yet get engulfed in another one overseas.
Is there no end to the administrative woes making life unnecessarily hard for local boxers?
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