IOC Is Seeking a Ring of Truth

The International Olympic Committee, concerned about the way matches are scored and officials are selected for boxing matches, has frozen about $9 million in payments due the International Boxing Assn., according to documents obtained by The Times.

A letter, signed July 9 by IOC President Jacques Rogge, says that the funds will remain frozen until the boxing association, known as AIBA, provides a “clear timeline and planned actions.”

At issue is $1.153 million remaining to be paid out from the 2001-04 Olympic cycle and about $8 million for the 2005-08 term.

The IOC ordered the freeze because of misgivings about judging in recent editions of the Games, and long-standing concerns about the management of Olympic-style boxing and AIBA under Anwar Chowdhry of Pakistan, the federation’s president since 1986.

Chowdhry, in an e-mail response Friday to questions posed by The Times about scoring and the selection of judges, did not address the freezing of funds. He said that AIBA was moving toward what proponents call an “open scoring” system allowing for a running tally visible around the arena during a bout -- something the IOC has pushed for.

Chowdhry also said the process of selecting and assigning judges, a far more worrisome concern for the IOC, was under review. He said plans were to introduce changes “step by step before the next Olympic Games,” in 2008 in Beijing.

Key IOC officials remained skeptical.

“We have the feeling not everything is right,” said Gerhard Heiberg of Norway, a member of the IOC’s executive board who also heads IOC marketing efforts and who, in 1994, served as chief of the Lillehammer Winter Games.

“We would like to get into this and get into a dialogue with AIBA, which has proven very, very difficult. So we are pursuing the matter.”

The matter, however, is not likely to result in the expulsion of boxing from the Olympic program.

Over the nearly 100 years that boxing has been included in the Games, no other sport, as Olympic historian David Wallechinsky puts it in his reference work, “The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics,” has had “anything approaching the tumultuous history of boxing, complete with attacks on referees and judges, sit-down strikes by boxers and full-scale riots.”

The call has regularly gone out for boxing to be kicked out of the Olympics. But boxing has also produced some of the Games’ greatest moments -- including in 1960 in Rome, when Cassius Clay, later known as Muhammad Ali, won gold for the U.S.

Also, for many of the 202 national Olympic committees, boxing is one sport in which an athlete, no matter his background, can legitimately aspire to a medal. The 2004 Games, for instance, produced boxing medalists from North Korea, Syria and Azerbaijan.

The IOC last month dropped baseball and softball from the 2012 London Games but kept all 26 other summer sports -- including boxing.

The move to freeze payments to AIBA, however, reflects the IOC’s tougher scrutiny of so-called “judged sports” in the wake of controversies at both the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games and the 2004 Athens Olympics.

The Athens Games were characterized by a judging dispute involving U.S. gymnast Paul Hamm. Ultimately, sports’ top tribunal, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, ruled that Hamm could keep the gold medal in the men’s all-around event, despite protests by rival Yang Tae Young and the South Korean Olympic Committee.

A judging scandal at the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City led to the awarding of duplicate gold medals to Canadian and Russian pairs figure skaters.

After the Salt Lake City Olympics, figure skating officials launched a reform of their sport’s scoring system. After Athens, officials from fencing, gymnastics, taekwondo and wrestling, pressed by the IOC, pledged to reform or streamline scoring. IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said those federations have made “good progress.”

Documents indicate that the IOC has asked AIBA for reform as well. Heiberg raised concerns in letters sent to then-IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch after the 2000 Games in Sydney and again, after Athens, to Rogge, who took over the IOC presidency in 2001.

Even so, for boxing, Davies said, “the issues currently remain outstanding.”

The scoring of boxing at the Olympic Games has, for almost all of Chowdhry’s term, been marked by controversy -- dating to the 1988 Games in Seoul, when U.S. fighter Roy Jones Jr. pummeled South Korean Park Si Hun but lost the gold medal on a disputed 3-2 decision.

Threatened with expulsion after Seoul, AIBA instituted changes that included daily alcohol tests for referees and judges, and a computerized scoring system.Even a computerized result, however, depends on the eyesight and motor skills of each judge -- attributes that prior inquiries have found lacking.

In Barcelona in 1992, for example, U.S. light-flyweight Eric Griffin, a two-time world champion, battered Rafael Lozano of Spain but lost the fight. At one point, a flurry of blows to Lozano’s head led the referee to call a standing eight-count. But Griffin didn’t earn a single point for it because the judges weren’t pushing their buttons within the same second.

In theory, the running score of the bout is something of a secret, and absent a knockout, the first time the fans in the arena know the score, and the winner, is at the conclusion of the match when the referee raises the winning boxer’s hand.

In practice, an elaborate ad hoc system has sprung up and some managers and team corners know precisely what is going on, raising fairness questions.

“They have telexes, they have phones, they have text messages, they have hand signals, they have systems,” said Teddy Atlas, longtime analyst for ESPN2’s “Friday Night Fights” who served as color commentator for NBC’s boxing coverage at the 2000 and 2004 Games. “It’s a joke. It’s a running joke.... It’s comical.”

The IOC has pushed for open scoring, arguing that a running tally displayed for all to see would provide for accountability by the referee and judges.

In a letter to the IOC in June, Chowdhry said AIBA was not opposed to open scoring, that it had experimented with it 15 years ago.

Then he added, in an apparent admission of judging incompetence, “Regarding judges, they all want to be on the winning side, therefore whichever boxer was leading in the first round they would just stick to him and ignore the performance of the other boxer.”

There have been widespread allegations that qualified judges have not been selected and that fights have been tainted.

The IOC, however, acts only upon proof of misconduct and, so far, there has been none.