Olympic Officials Defend Algerian’s Eligibility in Boxing Controversy
Olympic officials on Friday tried urgently to rebut what they described as widespread “misinformation” that had turned a 46-second Olympic boxing match at the Paris Games into a forum for fierce debates and complicated questions about biology and competitive advantage in women’s sports.
Mark Adams, the chief spokesman for the I.O.C., derided news articles and social media posts that he said sought to cast doubt — unfairly, in the view of Olympic officials and even some other competitors — on the gender of one of the boxers in the women’s competition, Imane Khelif of Algeria. Mr. Adams stressed at a news conference that Khelif is not transgender.
“There has been some confusion that somehow it’s a man fighting a woman,” Mr. Adams said.
“The question you have to ask yourself is, are these athletes women?” he added. “The answer is yes,” according to their eligibility, passport and history.
Khelif won her opening bout on Thursday when her Italian opponent, Angela Carini, refused to continue, and after she was cleared to compete in the Olympics despite being suddenly disqualified during last year’s world championships in a dispute about her eligibility.
Thursday’s fight ended after less than a minute when Carini abandoned the bout after taking a powerful punch to the face. Khelif, who had boxed as a woman for her entire career with occasional success, will fight next in the quarterfinals on Saturday.
Carini later told reporters that the controversy over her defeat “makes me sad” and that she was worried about the focus on Khelif. “If the I.O.C. said she can fight, I respect that decision,” she said.
But the fallout from Khelif’s victory, and Carini’s comments immediately afterward about the force of her punches, brought new scrutiny to the various and sometimes minimal and vague rules regarding eligibility for some women’s sports, as well as to a fractious dispute between the International Olympic Committee and the former governing body for boxing at the Olympic Games.
Even as he defended Khelif, Mr. Adams acknowledged a lack of scientific, political and social consensus about how to resolve eligibility issues across women’s sports.
“It’s not a black-and-white issue,” he said, referring to the topic as “a minefield.”
At the same time, he cautioned, “If we start acting on every issue, every allegation, that comes up, then we start having the kind of witch hunts that we’re having now.”
Sex testing began at the Olympics in 1968 and was halted in 2000. The I.O.C. has left it up to individual sports governing bodies to determine their own eligibility rules.
Boxing at the Paris Olympics is being overseen by a temporary body set up by the I.O.C. after the International Boxing Association was stripped of its authority as a governing body in June 2023. But the tournament itself is being held under rules established by the I.B.A., and those regulations essentially determine competitors’ eligibility by the sex listed on an athlete’s passport.
Still, Khelif and another boxer, Lin Yu-ting of Chinese Taipei, were disqualified during the 2023 world boxing championships by a murky process that the I.O.C. has called arbitrary and unfair. The decision has never been fully explained by boxing officials. Lin, a former world champion, won her opening bout on Friday but declined to speak to reporters afterward.
Both athletes have competed in women’s boxing for years, including at the Tokyo Olympics, at which neither won a medal. The widespread criticism of them now, even before Lin had entered the ring, had been “pretty emotionally damaging” to them, Mr. Adams said.
The president of the boxing association, Umar Kremlev of Russia, told the Tass news agency after the 2023 world championships that Khelif and Lin had been disqualified during that competition because they possessed X and Y chromosomes, the typical male pattern.
It is not clear if Mr. Kremlev was referring to what is called a difference of sexual development known as 46XY DSD. Athletes with the condition are legally female or intersex; have the typical male pattern of chromosomes; testes or ambiguous genitalia; testosterone in the male range; and the ability to respond to testosterone in ways typical to men.
Minutes of a boxing association meeting held shortly after the 2023 disqualification appear to show that the ouster was decided solely by the association’s chief executive and later ratified by its board. The minutes also stressed the need for the boxing association to establish “a clear procedure on gender testing.”
Christian Klaue, another I.O.C. spokesman, said on Friday, “You cannot just come out and disqualify somebody and say, OK, we don’t have rules and we establish the rules afterward.”
According to the minutes of the meeting, Khelif and Lin also failed eligibility requirements at the 2022 world championships in Istanbul, but testing results were not received until the conclusion of the competition, so the athletes were not disqualified.
The two were allowed to compete at the 2023 world championships but then disqualified during the competition. The nature of the testing administered in 2023 and 2023 remains unclear.
According to the boxing association, Khelif initially appealed her disqualification last year to the Court of Arbitration for Sport “but withdrew the appeal during the process, making the I.B.A. decision legally binding.” Lin did not challenge her disqualification.
Referring to the 2023 disqualifications, Mr. Adams of the I.O.C. expressed skepticism about the legitimacy of the testing undergone by Khelif and Lin. “We don’t know what the protocol was,” he said. “We don’t know whether the test is accurate. We don’t know whether we should believe the test.”
Some Olympic officials have noted that Khelif’s disqualification in 2023 came after the Algerian defeated a Russian boxer, though there has been no proof that this caused Khelif’s ouster.
Before decertifying the International Boxing Association, the I.O.C. expressed concern about the association’s heavy reliance for funding on Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, as well as its concern about scandals involving refereeing and judging.
While suspended in 2023, the boxing association invited Russian athletes to compete under their own flag at the world championships in New Delhi, contravening I.O.C. recommendations after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Three months later, the Olympic committee withdrew the authority of the International Boxing Association to oversee the sport at the Paris Games.
In an interview on Thursday, Claressa Shields, the first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing, suggested that testing for testosterone levels was a potential way to offer clarity on a complex issue. But, like Olympic officials, she acknowledged that simple solutions were impossible, and warned that “we can’t punish a woman for naturally having something that other women don’t have.”
“My stance is, men should fight against men, women should fight against women, and transgenders should fight against transgenders if there are any fighting in the Olympics,” Shields said. “But this situation here, it was woman vs. woman, so that’s were the confusion is coming in for me.”
The I.O.C. said Friday it hopes that another international federation will be certified so that boxing can remain part of the Olympic program at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
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