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PARIS: Boxing is already on the Olympic ropes after an epic battle between the exiled governing body and the IOC. Although the sport has been a staple of Olympic programs for more than a century, it could be dropped from the Los Angeles Games if major changes to the governing body do not take place next year.

The fights will still take place in Paris this month, but this Olympic tournament will look like nothing fans have seen in decades. In some ways for the better, but in others, probably for the worse.

Twelve years after women’s boxing made its Olympic debut with just 36 fighters in three weight classes in London, the sport has arguably achieved gender parity and, with it, the overall goal of the Olympic movement. Barring a few last-minute additions or dropouts, half of the 248 boxers in Paris will be women, competing in six weight classes.

But the milestone was achieved by drastically reducing the number of male boxers in an overall field that will be the smallest for Olympic boxing since 1956. While there will be 23 more women fighting in Paris than in Tokyo three years ago, there will also be a whopping 63 fewer men, and they will be fighting in just seven weight classes — the fewest since 1908.

In fact, Paris will have dozens fewer boxers than at any other Games in the 21st century. The 248 fighters in Paris are a shadow of the 432 who competed in Seoul in 1988, and a significant drop from the 289 who competed in Tokyo.

USA Boxing head coach Billy Walsh has been a staunch supporter of the women’s sport since coaching his native Ireland’s Katie Taylor to a gold medal in London. He says the addition of three weight classes for women in Paris is “fantastic.”

Walsh still acknowledges the downsides of the sport’s growth when pitted against the IOC’s typically strict cap on the total number of Olympic participants. It’s rare to add more athletes to a traditional Olympic sport, especially when the IOC is adding trendy new sports to each Games.

“It’s sad for the men in a way,” said Walsh, who represented Ireland at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. “Because when I boxed, they had 12 (men’s) weight classes. They went to 10, then eight, and now we’re at seven.”

Eight years ago, 250 men in Rio de Janeiro had the career-defining honor of being Olympic boxers. That number has been halved eight years later, with 124 men competing in three fewer weight classes than in Rio.

Men’s boxing in Paris will have the fewest weight classes since 1908 in London, where the second boxing tournament of the modern Olympics was contested in just five weight classes. Three years earlier in Tokyo, men’s boxing had already dropped to eight weight classes for the first time since 1948.

That means there is no longer an Olympic weight class between 71 kilograms (156 pounds) and 80 kilograms (176 pounds). Professional middleweights fight at 160 pounds, and super middleweights weigh in at 168 pounds, but any fighter who couldn’t make it below or above the Olympic limits was out of luck.

That’s a concern for Walsh and many others in the sport. Eliminating weight classes encourages fighters to push their bodies to the limits to see if they can fit into a less-than-ideal weight class to qualify — and that can lead to mismatches at all levels.

“When we cut the numbers down, there was a big gap in the weight classes,” Walsh said. “There’s so much gap now. There’s a reason why there are (weight classes). It’s the power of the punch. These guys hurt you. You can do damage. If one guy barely makes it to welterweight, he’s got to put on 20 pounds, and the other guy comes in 10 or 12 pounds above that, there’s a lot of power in the punch. It’s a combat sport, and people get hurt, get injured. I worry about that.”

Fewer fighters means smaller teams for many countries – and fewer chances to win gold, even for the sport’s traditional powerhouses.

The U.S., which has won the most medals and gold medals in Olympic history, qualified eight fighters for Paris under a challenging new qualification system administered by the IOC task force that oversees the tournament. The U.S. team will have fewer fighters than Australia — which had an unusually easy path to Paris under the new system — Brazil, Ireland or modern amateur boxing powers Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Cuba, which trails the U.S. in Olympic performance, will improbably have only five fighters in Paris after two men failed to secure a spot in the final qualifying tournament. Cuba also has no women on its team for a fourth straight Olympics, despite belatedly lifting its domestic ban on women’s sports in late 2022.

Still, the small Cuban delegation includes two-time gold medalists Arlen Lopez and Julio Cesar La Cruz, both of whom will be trying to join Hungary’s Laszlo Papp and Cuban compatriots Teofilo Stevenson and Felix Savon as the only three-time Olympic boxing champions.

The smaller field will lead to a different kind of competition in Paris: fewer fights with higher stakes. That could be exciting, especially if the fresher fighters advance to the medal rounds, which will be held at the famous Roland Garros tennis complex.

Many fighters only need to win two fights to secure an Olympic medal, including every man fighting at heavyweight and super heavyweight. Both divisions have only 16 competitors, and no weight class in Paris has more than 22 fighters.

The tournament won’t even last the entire Olympiad: for the first time in decades, the boxing competition will end a day before the closing ceremony.

“It’s going to be different, that’s for sure,” Walsh said. “But it’s going to be exciting.”