Kazakhstan World Championships the last as AIBA takes a leap towards professional status

The World Amateur Boxing Championships in October will be the last event of its kind as amateur boxing takes a leap towards professionalism, with the newly formed APB, the professional wing of the International Amateur Boxing Association (AIBA). The word "amateur" no longer applies to the AIBA as the organisation aggressively moves towards professional status while holding Olympic Games eligibility.

Astana in Kazakhstan, where this year’s championships are being staged, will be a final shop window for the best amateurs in the world before the world and European events are effectively dumbed down.

Irish bantamweight John Joe Nevin, soon to be officially ranked number one in the world and middleweight Jason Quigley, who also won a gold medal last week at the European Championships, will be performing in Astana for their boxing futures.

The APB, which was supposed to kick off in April of this year but will do so next year, will cherry pick the best fighters from this year’s world event.

Chaotic aspect
Although there is a chaotic aspect to the changes, with little information about formats and eligibility, it is clear that those who sign up will no longer be permitted to compete in the World Championships, European Championships or their own domestic National Championships.

As the AIBA moves towards becoming a boxing promoter as much as a governing body, the relevance of the 2015 World Championships has already been diminished with just the gold medal winner qualifying for Rio 2016.

In previous World Championship events as many as eight boxers qualified from each of the 10 weight divisions for the Olympic Games.

The bid document for the 2015 World Championships, which invites applications to host the event for a fee of 1.5 million Swiss Francs, is clear and specifies that only the world champion will qualify for Rio.

"The 2015 AIBA World Boxing Championships is a qualifying competition for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. All gold medallists of this competition will be directly qualified to participate in the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2016," says the document.

Compete in Rio
It means that any boxer who wishes to compete in Rio can take their chances and hope to become world champion the year before the Olympics, or, they can sign up with the APB.

It is expected that as many as 80 per cent of the boxers that qualify for Rio 2016 will come from the ranks of the APB or the other professional body governed by the AIBA, the World Series of Boxing.

Either way the AIBA, through diktat and its professional wings has arranged for their professional boxers to have the lion’s share of Olympic places in Brazil.

In addition the top boxers who sign with the APB will be offered between €80,000 and €100,000 per season to compete, which is significantly more than elite Irish boxers currently receive from the Irish Sports Council (ISC).

The rapid move towards the APB also begs the question of whether the ISC should continue to fund Irish boxers in the same way as they do now, which is with a top grant of €40,000 per year and all the medical and travelling back up.

There is great uncertainty about the new enterprise but it is believed that Irish boxers would remain at home training with the Irish boxing association coaches between competitions although there would be no World, European or National Championships.

Celebrity status
The attraction is that the APB offers money (no one has explained where the money will come from) and the Olympics every four years, while turning professional and fighting for any of the current professional belts, such as WBO or WBC, excludes Olympic participation, although, even that issue is being fudged.

Desperate to cash in on the celebrity status of named professionals, there is a clause allowing professional boxers (WBO, IBF,WBC champions etc) and those with “added value” to rock up to the Olympics.

In that respect there are more than a few expecting a red carpet to be laid for Ukrainian heavyweight champions Vitali and Vladimir Klitschko and the Philippines’ eight-division world champion, Manny Pacquiao. “The difference between the WBO or IBF and what is happening here is that the WBO and IBF at least compete against each other whereas the AIBA controls everything,” said an Irish boxing advisor, sceptical about the whole enterprise. “This is an effort to control world boxing. There is massive money in doing that.”