Friday, August 02, 2024

Olympic Committee Speaks Out After Boxing Gender Controversy

Chris Malone Méndez
Thu, August 1, 2024 


The 2024 Olympics in Paris have been underway for less than a week and have already seen plenty of unforgettable moments, from the one-of-a-kind opening ceremony on the Seine to Simone Biles repeatedly making history on the mat with gold medal wins. Boxing at these Olympics, however, have been overshadowed by controversy due to the participation of one athlete.

Imane Khelif of Algeria has come under fire following a match against Italian boxer Angela Carini that made Carini quit after just 46 seconds. Khelif's participation itself has sparked controversy, as the 25-year-old was disqualified from the International Boxing Association's World Championship last year after testing deemed her ineligible for the women's competition. Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan, who is also competing at the 2024 Paris Olympics, was disqualified in the same manner.

The IBA on Wednesday stated that this was not a testosterone test, but rather “a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential. This test conclusively indicated that both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors."

Khelif initially appealed this decision, but later withdrew the appeal. Yu-Ting did not appeal.

In a statement released Aug. 1, the IOC addressed the controversy head-on and stood up for the boxers in question.

"We have seen in reports misleading information about two female athletes competing at the Olympic Games Paris 2024," the IOC stated plainly. "The two athletes have been competing in international boxing competitions for many years in the women’s category, including the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, International Boxing Association (IBA) World Championships, and IBA-sanctioned tournaments," the organization pointed out.

"These two athletes were the victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA. Towards the end of the IBA World Championships in 2023, they were suddenly disqualified without any due process," the note read.

"The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure—especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years. Such an approach is contrary to good governance," the statement continued.

"The IOC is saddened by the abuse that the two athletes are currently receiving," it added.

The IOC and IBA have different medical standards for competitors, and the IBA for years served as boxing's official governing body for the Olympics. That relationship began to fray in 2019 and was severed in 2023. The organization's former president Gafur Rakhimov was sanctioned by the U.S. for an alleged role in the heroin trade and organized crime, prompting questions about the IBA's integrity and finances, and his replacement Umar Kremlev earned disapproval for tying the organization's finances to Russian state energy company Gazprom.

As the IOC mentioned, both Khelif and Lin have always competed in women's categories at competitions around the world and have female gender markers on their passports. Neither athlete has publicly identified as transgender or intersex. The IOC determines eligibility based on the gender marked on the competitor's passport.

Algeria's Olympic Committee has spoken out against the uproar, calling it "baseless propaganda" and "unethical targeting and maligning of our esteemed athlete." Algeria does not allow medical gender transition nor recognition of transgender people on official documents, Equaldex notes.

It's not the first time a woman athlete's gender has been called into question after eligibility testing. In 2009, then-18-year-old South African runner Caster Semenya similarly faced international backlash and underwent sex testing, sparking controversy worldwide. Semenya went on to win back-to-back gold medals in the 800 meters at the 2012 and 2016 Olympics. In 2019, World Athletics implemented new rules preventing athletes like Semenya with certain disorders of sex development (DSDs) from participating in select events. She's since filed multiple lawsuits to be able to compete in races, ultimately earning a victory in Swiss court last year.

Still, the IOC is looking into how to better implement gender eligibility rules moving forward. If the issue isn't resolved, you might not see boxing at all when the Olympics come to Los Angeles in four years.

"The IOC has made it clear that it needs national boxing federations to reach a consensus around a new international federation in order for boxing to be included on the sports program of the Olympic Games LA28," the statement concluded.

Khelif is set to face off against Anna Luca Hámori of Hungary in the quarterfinals on Aug. 3. Lin will box against Uzbekistan's Sitora Turdibekova in the round of 16 on Aug. 2.


IOC: Female boxers were victims of arbitrary decision by International Boxing Association

josh peter, usa today
Thu, Aug 1, 2024,



PARIS – The International Olympic Committee (IOC) says two female boxers at the center of controversy over gender eligibility criteria were victims of a “sudden and arbitrary decision" by the International Boxing Association (IBA) in 2023.

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan both were disqualified from the 2023 women’s boxing world championships after the IBA claimed they had failed "gender eligibility tests." The IBA, which sanctions the world championships, made the announcement after Khelif and Lin won medals at the event in March 2023.

The IBA, long plagued with scandal and controversy, oversaw Olympics boxing before the IOC stripped it of the right before the Tokyo Games in 2021. Although the IBA has maintained control of the world championships, the IOC no longer recognizes the IBA as the international federation for boxing.

Citing minutes on the IBA’s website, the IOC said Thursday, “The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedures – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top level competition for many years."

The issue resurfaced this week when the IOC said both Khelif and Lin were eligible to compete at the Paris Olympics, and a furor erupted on social media Thursday after Khelif won her opening bout against Italy’s Angela Carini. Khelif landed one punch – on Carini’s nose – before the Italian boxer quit just 46 seconds into the welterweight bout at 146 pounds. Lin is scheduled to fight in her opening bout Friday.

With the likes of Jake Paul and J.K. Rowling expressing outrage over Khelif competing against other women, the IOC issued a statement later Thursday addressing the matter.

“The IOC is committed to protecting the human rights of all athletes participating in the Olympic Games," the organization said in a statement issued on social media. "… The IOC is saddened by the abuse that these two athletes are currently receiving."

The IOC said the gender and age of an athlete are based on their passports and that the current Olympic competition eligibility and entry regulations were in place during Olympic qualifying events in 2023. Both Lin and Khelif competed in the 2021 Tokyo Games and did not medal.

The IOC pointed to the IBA’s secretary general and CEO, Chris Roberts, as being responsible for disqualifying Khelif and Lin after they had won medals in 2023. Khelif won bronze, Lin gold before the IBA took them away.

Khelif, 25, made her amateur debut in 2018 at the Balkan Women's Tournament, according to BoxRec. She is 37-9 and has recorded five knockouts, according to BoxRec, and won a silver medal at the 2022 world championships.

Lin, 28, made her amateur debut in 2013 at the AIBA World Women's Youth Championships, according to BoxRec. She is 40-14 and has recorded one knockout, according to BoxRec, and won gold medals at the world championships in 2018 and 2022.

On Thursday, the IBA issued a statement saying the disqualification was "based on two trustworthy tests conducted on both athletes in two independent laboratories.''

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Olympic boxers at center of controversy are victims, IOC says


Olympic female boxers are being attacked. Let's just slow down and look at the facts

dan wolken, usa today
Thu, Aug 1, 2024

Imane Khelif of Algeria during her fight against Angela Carini of Italy at the Paris Olympics.


PARIS – Let’s make one thing very clear off the top. There isn’t a sane human being on Planet Earth who believes that a man should be boxing women in the Olympics.

Not a single one.

That said, let’s also say something equally as important: Slow down.

Of course, it’s already too late to contain the mania that is exploding around the Internet right now after Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s gender was questioned Thursday following a welterweight match that ended after 46 seconds when Italy’s Angela Carini took one punch and called it quits.

The video of the punch is out, and it’s vicious. The International Boxing Association (IBA) claims that Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan failed “gender eligibility tests” at the 2023 world championships. The IOC says they’re eligible to compete. The Italian coach serves up suspicions and hearsay. There’s no transparency around any of the actual facts.

And, of course, all the same grifters who dine out on “men in women’s sports” controversies are waking up to this news back in America and salivating over their next conquest.

So the horse is out of the barn now. It’s an issue. It’s a thing.

And with Khelif set to box again Saturday and Lin on Friday, it cannot be ignored.

But again – and this may be screaming into the void – everyone needs to take a breath, slow down and let the actual facts unfold.

Because here's the thing: There aren't a whole lot of facts right now. There are, however, plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the explosive narrative that a man was boxing women at the Olympics when you consider the underlying issues with that claim.

Let’s talk about some things we know, and some things we don’t know.

We know that on Wednesday, the IBA issued a statement saying that Khelif and Lin did not undergo a testosterone examination but failed “a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential” during the IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships in India in March of 2023.

Imane Khelif of Algeria during her fight against Angela Carini of Italy at the Paris Olympics.

We don’t know what kind of tests those were, what they were testing for or which organization oversaw the lab work. If you aren’t aware, those details are kind of a big deal in the Olympic world: Just look at the war going on between the World Anti-Doping Agency and the U.S Anti-Doping Agency over the 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive before the Tokyo Olympics three years ago but were allowed to compete in deference to Chinese anti-doping officials who claimed food contamination was at fault.

This stuff isn’t always black-and-white.

We don’t know exactly what Khelif and Lin are being accused of, by the IBA or anyone else. Is the idea that they’re men pretending to be women? Intersex issues that affect chromosomes or reproductive organs? There’s no indication – at all – that this has anything to do with transgenderism.

So what’s the actual theory here? Being clear about that matters not just on a human analytical level, but on a specific scientific level relative to what kind of testing the IOC would do that would allow them to compete. The IOC is adamant that it will not release any of that information. The IBA, to this point, has been vague about any testing specifics.

A 2023 story in the Taiwan News at the time of Lin’s disqualification said no explanation was given other than “an abnormality” and that she had never failed a gender test in the past. Some contemporaneous news reports around Lin’s disqualification speculated about women boxers having to take certain medications to adjust their menstrual cycles to match the competition schedule.

Here’s something else we also know: The IBA has been in a long-running dispute with the IOC, and as a result, boxing’s future in the Olympics beyond the Paris Games is up in the air.

What’s the dispute about? In a word: Russia.

When Umar Kremlev became the IBA president in 2020, he made his mark by signing a significant sponsorship deal with Gazprom, Russia’s state energy supplier. It is understood that Gazprom essentially funded the IBA’s entire operation.

Early in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. As a result, the IOC wanted the IBA to drop Gazprom and make other reforms to its governance and financial structures and to clean up a bevy of ethical issues.

Unsatisfied with the IBA’s response – including a claim that Gazprom’s sponsorship expired at the end of 2022 – the IOC stripped its sanction of the Olympic boxing tournament. The IBA appealed the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but was turned down on April 2 of this year for a variety of reasons, including the IBA’s continued lack of financial transparency, continuing issues with its referees and judges and failure to fully implement the government reform measures demanded by the IOC.

So here’s this long-running dispute between the IOC and a fully Russian-backed boxing organization, coming to a head at an Olympics where the Russians are truly personae non gratae. In fact, there are just 15 Russians competing under a neutral flag at these Olympics, nearly half of them playing tennis. The rest of them either opted out or did not pass the IOC’s neutrality standards, which primarily weeded out anyone who actively supported the war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, after the controversial opening ceremony, Kremlev, the IBA president, posted a video to X, formerly known as Twitter, in which he called IOC president Thomas Bach the “chief sodomite” and his team “society’s outcasts.”

What does all of this mean? It’s hard to say for sure, but if you think the IBA throwing gas on this story is entirely about chromosomes and testosterone, I have a dacha in Volvograd to sell you.

What else do we know? We know that Khelif and Lin have been competing in this sport for years, including the Olympics three years ago, and were not exactly dominating the competition. Khelif lost in the quarterfinals in Tokyo and Lin lost in the round of 16 of a different weight class. They were also being tested without any issue coming up, until this sudden 2023 test that nobody can really explain.

Amy Broadhurst, an Irish world champion boxer who has been in the ring with Khelif and beaten her, posted on X that, "Personally I don't think she has done anything to 'cheat'. I thinks (sic) it's the way she was born & that's out of her control. The fact that she has been (beaten) by 9 females before says it all."

She followed: "If this is a man and it becomes 100% fact, I'll be disgusted that I was in the ring and so was many others. A man vs a woman is far from ok. But right now nobody knows what the true facts are."

We also know – or can at least safely speculate – that in Khelif’s case, Algeria would be a strange place to incubate a star women’s boxer who was actually a man or began life as a man. This is a Muslim country where same-sex acts are illegal and the LGBT community is subject to significant discrimination. Algeria's Olympic committee has issued a statement strongly denying what it called "baseless propaganda" and "unethical targeting and maligning of our esteemed athlete."

So when you put all this entire fact pattern together, there are far too many unanswered questions and obvious agendas here for the American political right-wing to send this train down the tracks in good faith. And yet that didn’t stop Sen. Tommy Tuberville, for one, to post the Khelif punch video on social media with the comment “If @KamalaHarris has her way, this will be happening in elementary schools all over the U.S. soon.”

The Olympics are not halfway over. Khelif is going to fight again, and there will be lots of eyeballs on her, more questions asked and hopefully some actual answers uncovered.

In the meantime, though, we can all agree that men should not be fighting women in the boxing ring at an Olympics. But we don’t know that’s what this is.

So let’s just slow down.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Two boxers under fire over Olympic gender tests. Let's look at facts

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