Has boxing fought its last Olympic round?

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Once again, boxing is up to its old tricks at the Olympic Games. Like ice dancing and weightlifting, it is an Olympic sport that can’t keep its nose clean.

When it’s not establishing the next salient of the culture wars, it’s in the middle of some corruption outrage or fixing scandal. It never ends with these people.

A lot of great things happened at the Paris Olympics on Thursday, but there was only one story: the Italian boxer who gave up after 46 seconds to her Algerian opponent. That Algerian, Imane Khelif, has been embroiled in an ongoing, and often misleading, argument about her biological sex.

In the normal course of things, all of this would be handled by an overarching boxing federation, except boxing doesn’t have one.

That job used to be done by the International Boxing Association (IBA). For years, the International Olympic Committee tried to get the IBA under its big thumb. The IBA resisted like, well, boxers.

The proverbial last straw came when the IBA fell under the management of a new president from Russia. He brought in Russian energy giant Gazprom, a banned entity, as a major sponsor. Also, a bit of the usual stuff about corrupt judging and fixed matches.

Last year, the IOC kicked the IBA out of the Olympic family. They weren’t even allowed to live in the shed – the IOC’s usual way of handling such evictions. Until it cleans up its act, the IBA cannot come home.

But the IBA is still in charge outside the boundaries of the Olympics. It created the problem with Khelif, as well as with a Taiwanese boxer here, by banning both women from last year’s world championships. At the time, the association said, the two had “competitive advantages over other female competitors.”

It’s gotten even more obscure since then. A recent IBA news release talked about a “recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential.”

Well, that clears it up.

So the Olympics is over here talking about its eligibility criteria (being declared female on your passport), and the IBA is over there talking about a secret test it’s not willing to name that it assures you is on the up and up.

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In this decade’s terms, it is pretty close to the perfect act of sabotage: Light the fuse on a gender-in-women’s-sports issue, then drop it in the IOC’s pocket right before an Olympics. On Thursday, it blew up.

The IOC is in a mad scramble of comments and releases, most of which are close to incomprehensible because it is so terrified of saying the wrong thing.

In the midst of this bureaucratic death match, there is the future of boxing as an Olympic sport to consider. It’s not looking good.

The IOC has said, and has reiterated here in Paris, that if boxing has no federation in good time before Los Angeles 2028, then there will be no boxing at those Games.

The IOC is in no position to impose a federation on boxing and has no interest in continuing to do the job itself. Everything that happened Thursday will have been a nice reminder that no good deed goes unpunished.

Meanwhile, the IBA shows no sign of leaving the field. If anything, its banishment has only made it more obstreperous.

Then there’s the breakaway federation that calls itself World Boxing, which is bobbing up and down, trying to catch the IOC’s eye. On Wednesday, sensing its chance, it was all over the place giving statements about how the IOC is right in this instance and the IBA is always wrong.

What’s World Boxing’s gender policy? Oh, oh, sorry, too soon to say, it’ll have to see about that.

What boxing is proving right now at the Olympics is that there is the glory of sport, and then there’s the agenda of the people in charge. Once the two come into conflict, the latter wins every time.

Were it a more normal, tends-to-abide-by-the-rules sport – like, say, archery or diving – you’d believe it’ll figure it out. Four years is forever.

But boxing is its own thing. It is perhaps the most elemental Olympic sport. Every origin story in every culture has a fight somewhere in there at the beginning.

In its favour, boxing has produced some of the great Games moments. Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, showed up at Rome 1960 as an unknown. It was the last time in his life he’d be that way. The Olympics were the springboard that launched arguably the greatest athlete of the 20th century.

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But boxing has also caused nothing but trouble. Every four years, there seems to be at least one match whose outcome makes absolutely no sense, even to the uninitiated. Often more than one.

For instance, at the 2012 Olympics, a Japanese boxer knocked his Azerbaijani opponent down five times. The referee ruled them slips. The Azerbaijani had to be carried away at the end of the fight. He still won via decision. The win was later overturned. The referee was expelled from the Olympics.

Who needs that hassle?

The IOC has been trying for years to get boxing, boxers and the people who run boxing under control. It hasn’t worked.

Maybe it’s just in the nature of those who deliver beatings for a living to refuse to be told what to do. In that sense, it’s almost admirable. They are the sport that will not bend.

It’s like Angela Carini, the already almost forgotten Italian in the match that has caused all this upset, has said: “I was taught to be a warrior.”

You can’t negotiate with warriors. Only politicians do that.

It would be sad to see boxing go at the Olympics. There’s a lot of history and emotion there. A lot of great memories of the good times.

But on a practical level, there is no sensible reason to keep trying to hold an irredeemably broken relationship together. Some estrangements are for the best.

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