Former middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin to run for presidency of Olympic boxing body

Former boxing champ Gennady Golovkin is heading into an electoral fight as he runs to become president of World Boxing, the new body aiming to run Olympic bouts at the Los Angeles Games in 2028.

Golovkin is one of two candidates announced Friday as running for the post at a congress in Rome next month. World Boxing’s founding president, Dutch official Boris van der Vorst, is stepping down. Golovkin’s opponent will be Mariolis Charilaos from Greece, a former president of the Hellenic Boxing Federation.

Golovkin is likely to be the frontrunner after he headed a World Boxing delegation to rebuild ties with the International Olympic Committee, which had hinted at removing boxing from the Olympic program for 2028.

The IOC granted World Boxing provisional recognition in February, putting the sport back on track to be in Los Angeles.

Golovkin won an Olympic silver medal in 2004 and, after turning pro, was a longtime world middleweight champion who fought in some of the sport’s most lucrative bouts, finishing with a 42-2-1 record. Since retirement, he has become president of Kazakhstan’s national Olympic committee.

Golovkin said in a statement that he will work “to secure boxing’s Olympic future, restore global confidence, and ensure that every federation, coach, and athlete – no matter how small or far away- has a fair chance to grow.”

Whoever wins the World Boxing job will have a busy agenda.

Boxing’s role in the Olympics came into question over a long-running dispute between the IOC and the International Boxing Association over the fairness of judging, financial issues and the rule of IBA’s outspoken Russian president Umar Kremlev.

The IOC ran the last two Olympic tournaments on its own after first suspending and then banishing the IBA from the Games and has said it no longer wishes to organize the tournament in-house.

While World Boxing has made progress mending relationships with the IOC, the IBA still exists and can attract fighters with lavish prize money, even if it can’t offer Olympic places.

World Boxing also has to deal with the issue of sex testing in sports after Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting from Taiwan 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 it named her specifically when announcing it would make sex testing mandatory. Days later, Khelif skipped a World Boxing event in the Netherlands.