Louisville Renaming Airport After Muhammad Ali

Louisville city officials on Wednesday announced that Louisville International Airport would be getting a name change to honor one of its “Greatest.”

The airport will now be called Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport after the late boxer and humanitarian who was born and spent a lot of his life in the city. The news comes a day before Ali would have turned 77-years-old.

“Muhammad Ali belonged to the world, but he only had one hometown, and fortunately, that is our great city of Louisville,” Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said on Wednesday.

While the name is changing, the airport’s SDF code will not.

Ali, who was born in Louisville in 1942, is one the most important sport and culture figures in American history, a multiple time heavyweight world champion and an Olympic Gold medalist. He is, perhaps, most famous for his refusal to be drafted into the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, a decision that got him arrested and stripped of his boxing titles. Ali would eventually appeal that decision all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned his conviction in 1971.

Ali died after a long battle with Parkinson’s syndrome in 2016.