Gennady Golovkin Fighting to Keep Boxing in the Olympics

Gennady Golovkin may or may not be retired from the ring – he hasn’t entirely closed the door on the prospect of returning for the perfect opportunity – but he certainly hasn’t finished fighting. His latest challenge, however, isn’t defeating an overmatched middleweight contender but battling to keep boxing in the Olympics. With Paris 2024 just around the corner, Golovkin – the new head of Kazakhstan’s National Olympic Committee, himself a former Olympian – is hoping he can use his experience and status in the game to help ensure boxing is still a part of proceedings when the Olympic circus rolls into Los Angeles in 2028.

“I never announced my retirement, and it’s against my nature to make any loud announcements,” the former middleweight champion said through a translator in a recent interview with BoxingScene. “So time will tell. Right now, I have this task, and I love what I’m doing. At the same time, to me life is movement. And if a big challenge comes my way, and I see that it’s a good way to switch gears, a good way to realign my path or my movement, I might accept this challenge. So we might see another fight with me.”

The future Hall of Famer, whose last outing was a decision loss to Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in 2022, does, however, concede that he had begun significantly winding down his physical activity when the opportunity arose to pursue his new position.

“It’s not that I offered my services or they approached me directly,” he said when asked how his new job came to be. “It was just a chain of circumstances and the fact that I was scaling down my professional career. I stopped training every day and I started to have more free time in my life. I care about sports in general; sports are very close to my heart, and it is an opportunity for me to contribute to the development of sport in my country. I’m an athlete; I’m on the athletes’ side. I’m not a bureaucrat, not a politician. I’m for the people, for athletes. And when the election for President of the National Olympic Committee came about, I agreed to take part, and that’s how I got elected.”

His position requires him to learn about and support all manner of Olympic athletes in Kazakhstan, a task he says he welcomes because “as an athlete myself, I think that our athletes should be in a better position.” But whereas Golovkin the pro boxer was famous for his unrelenting aggression, he is less direct about what he sees as the biggest problems Olympic athletes are facing.

“We need to fight corruption,” he offered, in general terms. “And we need to eradicate the opportunities for corruption, to make corruption not possible. And I’m not talking about any particular country. I’m saying that it is the universal problem.”

Few sports go hand-in-hand with corruption more than boxing, but even the cesspool of professional prizefighting has to yield to the unholy mess that is the sport’s amateur program. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has withdrawn recognition of the International Boxing Association (IBA) as the international federation for the sport, leaving it without any long-term governance. Boxing at the Paris Games is being organized by the IOC itself, but the committee has made it clear that that is not a tenable solution beyond this summer. The amateur programs in some countries – including the United Kingdom and United States – have founded an alternative to the IBA, called World Boxing, but Golovkin would not be drawn when asked whether he would encourage Kazakhstan to join it.

“The solution is for all the countries to get together, to sit down and to discuss and reach a solution on how to keep boxing as part of the Olympic program,” he said.

He seems on more comfortable ground when sharing his personal feelings about the mess in which Olympic boxing is embroiled.

“It upsets me,” he confessed. “It saddens me. And I think the situation is unacceptable, not because I’m a boxer, but because boxing is one of the most popular sports in the world. And it’s extremely hard to imagine an Olympic Games without boxing. So we need to do pretty much anything possible to keep boxing as part of the Olympic program. And I think that it is important to keep it because it gives the jump start to boxers. It gives them an opportunity to continue with their professional career after they finish their amateur career. So boxing has to be part of the Olympics.”

Golovkin will be in Paris, where he and other national committee heads will be discussing how to save the sport’s participation in the Games.

“We have a plan that is pretty straightforward, and that’s what can be used in order to reach a result or look for a solution,” he said cryptically, by way of explanation of his agenda for the Games.

The Olympics have been as much about external factors as athletic competition almost since the modern Olympiad began – think Jesse Owens in Berlin in 1936, the massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972, successive boycotts in 1976, 1980 and 1984, or the global pandemic that threatened to derail Tokyo 2020 and ultimately delayed it by a year. But Golovkin, who won silver at the 2004 Games in Athens, urges athletes participating in Paris to rise above the background noise and to embrace the Olympic ethos.

“Do not put results above your integrity, above your honesty, above your pride,” he said. “No matter what happens, you have to be a person of integrity and avoid selling yourself at all costs.”

At the same time, he encourages them to savor every moment.

“It is an amazing experience,” he said. “The opening ceremony, the closing ceremony and especially if you get a medal and you’re a champion. So yes, most of all, I would tell them to enjoy it.”

Kieran Mulvaney has written, broadcast and podcasted about boxing for HBO, Showtime, ESPN and Reuters, among other outlets. He also writes regularly for National Geographic, has written several books on the Arctic and Antarctic, and is at his happiest hanging out with wild polar bears. His website is www.kieranmulvaney.com