Gavin Cooney

THE FIRST ITEM on Ireland’s agenda at the youth world boxing championships: the split. 

The tournament is taking place in Budva, Montenegro over the next fortnight, and you might be surprised to hear there are two separate Irish teams in action. 

Even for a sporting nation as adept at splits as ours, this one’s of another level. It’s rare we have a schism as baroque as this one, as it is unprecedented on a global scale and is brazenly cynical even by the dejected standards of amateur boxing. 

There is an official Irish team of eight boxers in action, selected by the IABA by the usual means. They are boxing beneath the tricolour, are assisted by Irish coaches and support staff, and they’ll belt out Amhran na BhFiann if they win a gold medal. 

Then there’s a rogue team of 11 Irish boxers, who were not selected by the IABA. Instead, they are wrapping their hands in Montenegro as neutral athletes, and so won’t be anywhere near a tricolour, won’t have any Irish support staff, and won’t have any anthem to sing in the event of victory. 

We understand an individual in Irish boxing contacted the IBA and requested that they grant neutral status to 11 boxers overlooked by the IABA, to allow them to compete at a tournament for which they were not selected.

The neutral athlete mechanism is usually reserved for two cases. The first is for technical cases in which boxers who are not affiliated to a national governing body. Last year, for instance, an Irish-based Dutch fighter in Ireland who was not yet eligible to represent Ireland but also not linked to her native federation was granted status as a neutral athlete at the European U22 championships.

The second instance is for refugees. 

All of the 11 boxers are entitled to feel stung and upset at their respective omissions from the Irish team but, equally, their parent or guardian have previously signed the IABA’s nomination agreement form on their behalf, which is in part an agreement to accept selection decisions such as these. 

Nowhere in the small print of that agreement does it empower anyone to react to an omission by pleading to the Russia-backed international governing body for backdoor entry to one of their tournaments citing a technicality under criteria usually reserved for refugees. And yet somebody has pled the case of the 11 boxers, and the IBA have reacted with approval. 

The IABA warned the 11 boxers they didn’t have permission to travel, and won’t be covering their expenses or insurance costs. The IBA are presumably shelling out for that. The IABA won’t sanction any of the 11 boxers as some are under the age of 18, but they have warned there will be repercussions for any adults travelling as support staff. It seems that none of the fighters’ respective club coaches have joined them in Montenegro, however, so the IBA will have to provide corner support too. 

There are no instances of fighters from opposing Irish teams being classed in the same weight, so we are at least spared the prospect of two fighters from either side squaring off. 

That small mercy is quickly mantled by the many potential implications of all of this, as the whole episode risks undermining the principle and system of national teams and federations. Why bother falling in line with directives from a national governing body if you can simply ring the IBA and get a spot as a neutral athlete? 

Governing bodies and national teams are vital in a macro sense in handling and distributing State funding, but more fundamentally they exist to promote a meritocracy. Everybody is part of the same pool, from which everyone can be judged and thus rewarded.

And in boxing there is a crucial safety element baked into the meritocracy, especially at junior level: nobody will be sent to international competition by their national body if they aren’t deemed ready to step in the ring with the most ferocious of their peers. The IBA’s backdoor offers no guarantee of any of those safeguards. 

There is also a very specific context to consider, as this tournament is happening amid Irish boxing’s slow grind toward withdrawal from the IBA to salvage Irish boxing at the next Olympic Games, from which the sport here derives virtually all of its income. 

The IBA are a disgraced organisation, no longer recognised by the International Olympic Committee for its close links to Russia, opaque finances, and failure to meaningfully address the blight of bout-fixing. 

Boxing will not be at the LA Games in 2028 if an alternative governing body does not materialise to run the sport for the Olympics, and hopes are that organising body will be the emergent World Boxing. 

The Olympic Federation of Ireland have warned Irish boxing that they must join World Boxing if Irish fighters are eligible to compete at the LA Games, and the IABA took the first steps in the right direction with a vote earlier this month to remove all references to the IBA from their constitution. 

And yet as the exhaustive work begins to sever all official ties to the IBA, this sorry episode exposes an attempt by some individuals to ratchet those links tighter. 

It also appears that the IBA are using this Irish example as a not-too-subtle nod to any IBA-loyal members of any other federations seeking to affiliate with World Boxing in order to compete at the next Olympic Games. 

Chalk this down as another day in which Ireland proved itself to be a world-leading boxing nation in all the wrong ways.