A sensible baseline your federation can adopt today

Standing up a federation means writing rules, building forms, and setting the safety and safeguarding requirements that keep boxers protected. Most bodies do this from scratch, which takes months and produces yet another slightly different version of rules that are, in truth, already settled across the sport.

You do not need to start from a blank page. BoxerConnect read the primary rulebooks of every major boxing body and mapped 23 core rule areas. The result was clear: the sport agrees on far more than it disagrees on.

• 13 of the 23 areas have broad agreement. Weigh-ins, glove and wrap rules, round formats, the count, the role of officials and the rest are effectively common ground.
• Eight areas have partial agreement, with minor local variation you can set to suit your own competitions.
• Only two areas are genuinely contested. Adopting the baseline gives you a defensible, evidence-aligned starting point for everything else, so your officials can spend their time on the decisions that actually need a local answer.

Three things, each usable on its own, and each free to take away.

• A baseline ruleset aligned to the Olympic pathway, built from the 23 mapped rule areas and the 28 primary rulebooks we read in full. It sets out where the sport agrees, where it varies locally, and where it is genuinely contested, so nothing is hidden behind a false consensus. See the convergence map and the baseline at /rules/open-standard.
• Open Forms: a library of 17 standardised forms with 190 fields, covering registration, medical consent, safeguarding, officials and competition administration. They are machine-readable (JSON) and released under CC BY 4.0, so you are free to use, share and adapt them, including commercially, with attribution to BoxerConnect. Browse them at /rules/open-forms or pull the data from /api/open-forms.
• The BoxerConnect platform, if you want it, to run registration, records, competitions and safeguarding on top of the baseline. This part is optional. The ruleset and the forms are yours whether or not you ever use our software.

The forms were designed around the parts of the sport that matter most for boxer welfare. Safeguarding and medical consent are structured fields inside the standard, not free-text afterthoughts.

• Medical consent, fitness-to-box and post-bout review are first-class parts of the form library.
• Safeguarding requirements travel with registration, so protection for young and vulnerable boxers is part of the baseline rather than an add-on.
• Because the forms are machine-readable, your medical officers and safeguarding leads work from consistent, structured records rather than scanned paper.

Where a question is safety-critical, the standard does not answer it for you. It defers to your medical evidence and your governing body. You keep control of every clinical and eligibility decision.

Of the 23 rule areas, only two are genuinely contested across the sport: whether elite boxers wear head guards, and how sex eligibility is decided.

On these two, BoxerConnect refuses to choose a side. We set out every position, and we defer to medical evidence and to the governing bodies. This is deliberate. These are safety and eligibility questions, and they belong with your medical officers and your recognised authorities, not with a grassroots platform.

We say this plainly because the split in the sport is real. The amateur world divided in two, between IBA and the new Olympic body World Boxing (founded 2023, granted IOC provisional recognition in February 2025, with boxing returning for LA28). Professional boxing was never unified, with four belt bodies (WBC, WBA, IBF and WBO) sitting on top of a local commission. A baseline that pretended these disputes were settled would not be honest, and it would not be safe.

BoxerConnect is a grassroots platform. We are not an accredited standards body, and we do not claim to be one. We mapped the rulebooks, we propose a baseline, and we give it away. We do not claim authority we have not earned.

• Nothing here is imposed on any existing federation, sanctioning body or commission.
• You can adopt the whole baseline, take only the forms, use only the parts that fit your competitions, or simply read the convergence map and write your own.
• Because Open Forms is released under CC BY 4.0, adopting it does not lock you to us. The forms remain yours to adapt and run anywhere.

Our position is simple. Safety framing wins, the sport keeps its authority, and we make the sensible starting point free to anyone who wants it.

This page is written for the officials of a national boxing federation, and it is most useful if you are:

• A new federation setting up rules, registration and safeguarding for the first time, and wanting an evidence-aligned baseline rather than a blank page.
• A reforming federation modernising older paper processes, bringing safeguarding and medical consent into structured records, and aligning to the Olympic pathway.

If you want to read the underlying detail first, the rules hub is at /rules, with the amateur and professional pictures at /rules/amateur-boxing and /rules/professional-boxing.