Sealing catches boxing officials on wrong foot

New Delhi, May 5 : The Indian Amateur Boxing Federation (IABF) found itself in an embarrassing situation over the weekend when the NDMC officials locked up its temporary office at Lajpat Nagar, almost resulting in the junior women’s squad to Turkey and the sub junior men’s squad to Azerbaijan from missing the tournaments.

The IABF officials were caught unawares as officials of the NDMC’s sealing drive descended on the building to close the basement premises from where the federation has been functioning since their eviction from the Nehru Stadium three months ago.

Senior IABF officials rushed to the office and were given three hours to take whatever papers they could, including the teams’s passports and travel documents.

Confirming this, IABF’s secretary-general PK Muralidharan Raja said, “We could just manage to beat the sealing deadline. Otherwise, the teams would have got stranded here with all the passports and travel documents locked inside.”

The women’s team left on Sunday, while the sub-junior men’s squad is scheduled to leave later tonight. Raja said the travel documents of the five boxers who have qualified for the Beijing Olympics — AL Lakra, Akhil Kumar, Jitender, Vijender and Dinesh — for the AIBA President’s Cup in Chinese Taipei from May 24, were also in the office locker.

With the Olympics just three months away, the boxing federation has not been fully functional. In fact, almost all sports federations that had moved out of the Nehru Stadium due to Commonwealth Games renovations are functioning from their secretaries’s residences.

Raja said permanent accommodation for federations was one of the main topics of discussion during a GTCC meet in Pune, venue of this year’s Commonwealth Youth Games. He said IOA president Suresh Kalmadi has assured that he would try and house them at the IG Stadium, but officials in the Sports Authority of India (SAI) were non-committal, fearing the federations may never return the premises to SAI.

“That’s how they occupied the Nehru Stadium so many years ago. But for the renovation that is going on, no one would have vacated. So many of them have huge bills pending,” said a SAI official who did not want to be named.

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