Women boxers to contest in 2012 Olympics

The world's best women boxers may be able to fight for gold at the London Olympics in 2012 - with golf and rugby union expected to follow four years later. Their inclusion, at the expense of the other sports which were vying to join the Olympics - baseball, karate, roller sports, squash and softball - should be ratified at an IOC meeting in Copenhagen in October.

Women last boxed at the Olympics in 1904, though they've been recently able to compete at other contact sports such as judo and taekwondo. Women's boxing has been professional for a while, and the sport came to wide public attention when Laila Ali and Jacqui Frazier-Lyde, the daughters of boxing's great rivals, Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazier, fought in 2001. A British boxer, Jane Couch (above, right), won a world championship and went to court in a successful bid to allow her to fight a man.

As for rugby union, the game's governing body wants sevens to be contested, rather than the full fifteen-a-side version of the sport, which disappeared from the Olympics in 1924.

"There is a perception of rugby being played mainly in eight countries but that is false," said Mike Miller, the chief executive of the International Rugby Board. "A crowd of more than 40,000 turned up to the final of the Europe Sevens in Germany this year."

Though Miller has said that he won't be asking him for any favours, Jacques Rogge, the current president of the IOC, has a rugby heritage, having played ten times for the Belgian national side.

Despite being a sport for which the Olympics would not be the pinnacle - it already has the four majors and the Ryder Cup - golf is also likely to make the cut for 2016.

Ty Votaw, the PGA official in charge of campaigning for golf at the Olympics, gave his argument for what his sport could add to the Games: "It can bring a 60m-strong army of participants to the Olympic movement, a television audience that goes across 230 countries and into 600 million homes, and the No1 athlete in the world [Tiger Woods], who has said he would like to take part." ·