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The International Olympic Committee has defended its decision to allow two boxers to compete in Paris who had previously been disqualified from world championships for failing to meet gender eligibility requirements, saying an escalating row had been fuelled by “misleading information”.
The IOC’s decision to permit Algeria’s Imane Khelif to participate in the women’s welterweight category at the Olympic Games has drawn criticism from Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Khelif’s Italian opponent withdrew from their match on Thursday less than a minute after it had begun.
Khelif competed at the Tokyo Games in 2021, but was one of two boxers barred from last year’s world championships by the International Boxing Association for not meeting eligibility criteria to compete as a woman, along with Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting. However, both athletes were cleared to compete in Paris by the IOC. Lin, the featherweight world champion in 2022, defeated Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova on Friday.
On Friday morning, the IOC’s head of communications Mark Adams said in a press conference that the IBA’s decision to disqualify Khelif last year was due to elevated levels of testosterone, but stressed that there was no question about her biological sex.
“The Algerian boxer was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport. This is not a transgender case,” he said. “Scientifically, this is not a man fighting a woman.”
On the IBA’s testing regime, he added: “We have no knowledge of what the tests were. They were cobbled together overnight.”
Complicating matters is the fact that the IBA, the body that disqualified Lin and Khelif, was itself suspended by the IOC in 2019 as the international governing body of the amateur version of the sport, because of concerns about its finances, ethics and governance.
The IOC has since assumed interim authority over boxing at the Olympics, and defended its position on Thursday evening, saying the two athletes in question had been “victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA”.
“We have seen in reports misleading information about two female athletes competing at the Olympic Games Paris 2024,” the IOC said. “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.”
Within the Olympic world, the international governing bodies of each sport determine their own rules on athlete qualification, including gender eligibility. World Athletics, the governing body of track and field, changed its rules in recent years to limit the disciplines in which athletes could compete who have differences in sex development, such as the South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya.
Earlier this week, the IBA said it had barred the two boxers from competing after a “meticulous review”, adding: “The decision . . . was extremely important and necessary to uphold the level of fairness and utmost integrity of the competition.” It said the precise nature of the tests conducted during the review were “confidential”, but further clouding the situation, it said neither boxer had a “testosterone examination” last year.
Earlier on Thursday, Meloni criticised the IOC for what she said was a failure to protect female athletes and safeguard the competition. “With the levels of testosterone in the Algerian athlete’s blood, the competition does not seem fair,” Meloni, who was in Paris to support Italian competitors, told reporters after Khelif’s fight against Angela Carini.
The Italian boxer told reporters that she had withdrawn from Thursday’s match “to safeguard my life”, after Khelif delivered a blow that injured her nose.
Carini’s withdrawal prompted a fierce backlash online from several high-profile voices including Tesla founder Elon Musk, author JK Rowling and US vice-presidential candidate JD Vance. However, Adams said: “What I would urge is that we try to take the culture war out of this and actually address the issues and think about the individuals and the people concerned.”
With the aborted fight dominating the front pages of Italian newspapers, Meloni raised the case and “the issue of rules to guarantee the fairness of sports competitions” at a meeting on Friday morning with the IOC president Thomas Bach. The Italian premier’s office said the two had agreed to stay in contact on the issue.
Algeria’s Olympic committee hit back at what it called “baseless propaganda” against Khelif, adding: “Such attacks on her personality and dignity are deeply unfair.”
The IOC and IBA have been at loggerheads for years over other issues, including the IBA’s move in May to offer prize money to gold medallists in Paris. In response, the IOC reiterated concerns it had about the IBA’s financial ties to Russian energy producer Gazprom. “As always with the IBA, it is unclear where the money is coming from,” the IOC said at the time.
Because of the row between the two bodies, boxing has not yet been included in the programme for the Los Angeles Games in 2028, despite being part of every Summer Olympics, bar one, since 1904.
