Golovkin Seeks Olympic Boxing Presidency: Heading to Los Angeles 2028

Gennady Golovkin Seeks World Boxing Presidency

Former boxing champion Gennadiy Golovkin is running for president of World Boxing, the new entity seeking to manage Olympic boxing matches at the 2028 Los Angeles Games. Golovkin is one of the two candidates announced this Friday for the position, which will be decided at a congress in Rome next month. The current founding president of World Boxing, the Dutchman Boris van der Vorst, will leave the position. Golovkin’s rival will be Mariolis Charilaos, from Greece, former president of the Hellenic Boxing Federation. Golovkin could be the favorite, as he led a World Boxing delegation to rebuild ties with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which had hinted at the possibility of removing boxing from the Olympic program for 2028. The IOC granted World Boxing provisional recognition in February, allowing the sport to be back on track to participate in Los Angeles. Golovkin won an Olympic silver medal in 2004 and, after turning professional, was a long-time middleweight world champion, participating in some of the sport’s most lucrative fights, ending his career with a record of 42-2-1. Since his retirement, he has become president of the National Olympic Committee of Kazakhstan.

I will work to secure the Olympic future of boxing, restore global trust, and ensure that every federation, coach, and athlete, no matter how small or far away, has a fair chance to grow.

Gennady Golovkin

Whoever wins the position at World Boxing will have a busy schedule. The role of boxing in the Olympic Games was put in doubt due to a long dispute between the IOC and the International Boxing Association (IBA) over the impartiality of refereeing, financial issues, and the leadership of the controversial Russian IBA president, Umar Kremlev. The IOC organized the last two Olympic tournaments on its own after suspending and then banishing the IBA from the Games and has stated that it no longer wishes to organize the tournament internally. While World Boxing has made progress in repairing relations with the IOC, the IBA still exists and can attract boxers with generous prizes, even if it cannot offer Olympic places. World Boxing also has to deal with the issue of sex testing in sport after Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting won gold at the Paris Olympics last summer, amid scrutiny over their eligibility. Van der Vorst apologized to Khelif on behalf of World Boxing in June, after he specifically mentioned her when announcing that he would make sex tests mandatory. Days later, Khelif skipped a World Boxing event in the Netherlands.