International Boxing Association To Give Prize Money To 2024 Olympic Medallists
The International Boxing Association (IBA) announced that it will award prize money to medallists at the Paris 2024 Olympics, despite not being involved in organising the event.
As the Olympics are an amateur sports event, not a professional sports event, the IOC does not award prize money. Instead, they distribute funding through international federations and national Olympic committees.
According to the IBA they will award gold medalists $100,000, silver medalists $50,000, and bronze medalists $25,000, with half going to the athlete and the rest shared between their coach and national federation. Additionally, quarter-finalists will get $10,000 each.
However, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has expressed concerns over the IBA's financial transparency, as there has been no disclosure of where the money they are intending to award the victors has come from.
The IOC suspended the IBA in 2019 over allegations of corruption before it stripped the IBA of its recognition in 2023 due to unresolved issues regarding governance and financial clarity, specifically its reliance on funding from Gazprom.
Boxing qualifications and competitions for Paris 2024 are organised by units set up by the IOC to protect athletes and ensure fairness. The IBA was not involved in the Tokyo Olympics and will not be involved in the Paris Olympics.
The IOC's statement highlighted that "Olympic boxing needs to be organised by a credible, well-governed International Federation."
Due to the ongoing issues, boxing is not included in the program for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. The IOC has made it clear that any boxer whose national federation is affiliated with the IBA will be ineligible for LA28.
This move by the IBA follows a recent decision by World Athletics to award prize money to track and field Olympic medalists, making World Athletics the first international federation to do so.
World Athletics President Sebastian Coe noted the importance of starting to return some of the generated revenues to athletes, stating, "It is important we start somewhere and make sure some of the revenues generated by our athletes at the Olympic Games are directly returned to those who make the Games the global spectacle that it is."
