Frank Warren
Frank Warren, Britain’s premier and longest-serving boxing promoter, has been building champions in the professional sport for nearly 45 years and was acknowledged for his work across the industry in 2008 with his entrance into the International Hall of Fame.
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Will Ioc ‘Snowflakes’ Leave Boxing Out In The Cold?
By Queensberry Promotions
HUBBARD’S CUPBOARD
By Alan Hubbard
Amateur boxing – at least, that’s what it used to be called when the combatants wore headguards and vests – is in a right old pugilistic pickle over the Olympics.
Right now there is more in-fighting outside the ropes than inside them as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and AIBA (the International Boxing Association) lock fists over the future if the sport in the Games.
IOC president Thomas Bach has even warned that AIBA could be booted out of the Olympic movement thus placing the sport’s participation in Tokyo two years hence and beyond in jeopardy.
Yet such has been the surge of popularity in boxing over the past couple of years –pro and amateur - that the IOC would be risking global condemnation and ridicule in the hopefully unlikely event of a ban on one of the Games’ most traditional and best-watched sports.
It has been well chronicled that the dispute centres around the impending elevation next month of the deeply controversial figure of Gafur Rakhimov from interim to full president of AIBA in succession to the now banned-for-life Dr C K Wu, who grossly overreached himself over his autocratic financial and fistic aspirations for the organisation and its 150 constituent bodies.
Why the IOC should suddenly pick on the dubious governance of boxing when in the past it has conveniently suffered from myopia over that of certain other sporting entities is the subject of some scornful curiosity.
However if AIBA is cast out there are other organisations waiting in the dressing room ready to step into the administrative ring as late subs.
It is my understanding that Mauricio Sulaiman the president of the World Boxing Council (WBC), who always claim to be the most authoritative of the pro game’s fistful of ruling bodies, has already held informal talks with a number of national boxing association as well as emissaries from the IOC about acting as an new umbrella organisation.
But cards on the table. Boxing is by no means the only Olympic sport which has endured questionable leadership with the full blessing of the IOC.
One might even suggest there was as convenient outbreak of that incipient myopia when those in charge of football, athletics and cycling were first subjected to legal and/or moral scrutiny.
And how do we know Mr Rakhimov really is the bad guy he has been labelled?
His critics claim he has ties with organised crime, though no proof has been forthcoming. In 2012, the US Department of the Treasury put financial sanctions on Rakhimov and several other individuals accused of being part of the so-called Brothers Circle criminal organisation.
Yet Rakhimov has never been charged with any crime in any country. In fact, he has won defamation suits at the high courts in Britain, Australia and France.
His sporting credentials certainly pass muster.
He took up boxing sport as a youth and later moved on to coaching. After Uzbekistan's independence in 1991, he set up several commercial enterprises, which included trading in both raw materials and finished consumer goods.
The 67-year-old from Tashkent also became a prominent figure in Central Asian boxing, and in 2001 and again in 2005 was elected vice-president of the National Olympic Committee of Uzbekistan.