Boxing Officials Offer Little Clarity on Olympic Eligibility Dispute
The news conference had been billed as an effort by international boxing authorities to clear up the reasons they banned two athletes from a women’s competition last year, and a chance to shed crucial light on what has become the biggest controversy at the Paris Olympics.
Instead, the gathering started 90 minutes late, then veered into the chaotic almost immediately. And when it ended about two hours later, almost nothing about the controversy had been clarified at all.
The head of the International Boxing Association, an organization no longer recognized by the International Olympic Committee to oversee the sport at the Games, had promised answers about why the organization excluded the two boxers, Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan.
Instead, appearing on a giant video screen from a room decorated with religious iconography, the association’s Russian president, Umar Kremlev, delivered wild accusations, personal attacks and employed questionable language when detailing the two women’s cases.
Earlier, a boxing official said that blood tests conducted on Khelif and Lin at last year’s world championships revealed they had X and Y chromosomes, the typical male pattern, before Kremlev bluntly said the tests “show they were men.” But he and the other panelists offered no evidence to support that statement. He said he did not know whether the athletes were transgender. The I.O.C. has insisted that they are women. He launched attacks on the Olympic committee, its German president Thomas Bach and the Paris Games themselves.
And in doing so, he most likely ensured that Khelif and Lin will receive even more negative attention, and more online abuse, related to their eligibility only a day before each will return to the ring to fight for an Olympic medal.
“I don’t care about anyone’s opinion,” Khelif said in an interview with the news service SNTV. “I came here for a medal, and to compete for a medal.”
Olympic officials, who have feuded with the I.B.A. leaders for months and spent days trying to tamp down a furor that began with Khelif’s 46-second victory over an Italian opponent on Thursday, responded to Monday’s news conference by dismissing the boxing organization.
“The content and the organization of the I.B.A. press conference tells you everything that you need to know about this organization and its credibility,” the I.O.C. said in a statement.
The I.B.A. had brought three officials to Paris to meet with a group of more than 100 of the world’s journalists in an ornate room. Looming over the proceedings, eventually appearing on a giant video screen from Moscow, was Kremlev, who, after technical problems were finally resolved, launched into one rambling soliloquy after another.
Appearing under at least three framed pictures depicting Christian icons, Kremlev frequently swiveled his neck from side to side as a boxer would in the minutes before a bout, as he held court.
He declared the I.B.A. had documented through blood testing that Lin and Khelif had high levels of testosterone, and said, in language that at times verged on being inappropriate, that the boxers had undergone tests revealing they had male characteristics.
He also doubled down on previous complaints that the Paris opening ceremony was offensive to religious groups — claims have led to death threats against its artistic director, even as the journalists present tried repeatedly to return the focus to the Olympic eligibility claims against Lin and Khelif.
Both boxers were well known in women’s events for several years — Lin is a former world champion — before becoming the focus of intense scrutiny in Paris. Yet even before Khelif beat an Italian opponent, Angela Carini, in her first bout last week, social media was abuzz with speculation about her disqualification, and that of Lin, at last year’s women’s world championships in India.
The International Olympic Committee, which is responsible for boxing at the Games after stripping the I.B.A. of the right to administer the sport at the event, has said that its guidelines for boxing confer access to the women’s category based on the designation on athletes’ passports. It has pointed out repeatedly that Khelif and Lin fought for years in women’s competitions without objections.
Yet Kremlev said Monday that he had no doubt that the two women could not participate in women’s competitions, after they were tested first in 2022 and then again in 2023.
“The tests show they were men,” Kremlev said in comments that were translated from Russian. He then added, using crude phrasing, that the association had not performed a physical examination of the two fighters and also said he could not be sure they were born as girls “or if some changes were made.”
Yet even as the I.B.A. discussed the boxers’ tests results openly, it said it was unable to provide specific details of the results because of medical confidentiality rules and what the officials said were requests by both the Algerian and Taiwanese delegations not to disclose the findings.
Algeria’s Olympic Committee has previously decried “malicious and unethical attacks directed against our distinguished athlete.” Taiwan’s delegation — the country competes as Chinese Taipei at the Olympics — said last week that it “strongly condemns the malicious online abuse and personal attacks.” Neither country made an immediate comment about the I.B.A.’s latest statement on Monday.
Ioannis Filippatos, the chairman of the I.B.A.’s medical and antidoping committee, offered a long presentation of his credentials as a gynecologist with 30 years of experience before telling the room he wanted the world “to know the truth.”
He said the women were first tested at a world championship in Istanbul in 2022. Those tests, a form of gene testing from blood samples, led officials to first draw conclusions about the two athletes without taking immediate action, he said.
“The medical result, blood result, looks — and the laboratory says — that these boxers are male,” he said.
But it would be another year before they were tested again and eventually disqualified. The time between the tests, and the years the two women had already boxed, belied claims by Chris Roberts, the British chief executive of the boxing organization, that athlete safety was “paramount” in its decision to disqualify them from women’s events.
The chairman of the I.B.A.’s coaches division, Gabriel Martelli, went further. “Our sport is dangerous,” he said. “When there is an unfair advantage people can die.”
The officials insisted, however, despite those stated dangers, that the only time they could test the athletes was at world championships. That only led to more questions about the competence of the body, which has been in a yearslong dispute with the I.O.C. over charges of severe governance failures.
That Kremlev is a Russian based in Moscow, and his organization is backed by millions of dollars from the Russian energy giant Gazprom at a time Russia has been barred from the Olympics, has led I.O.C. officials and others to suggest the current furor has been engineered to undermine the Paris Games.
I.B.A. officials dismissed that charge. They said they had written to the I.O.C. first in 2022 and then again in 2023 to provide details about the tests carried out on the athletes. The correspondence was ignored, they said.
The I.O.C. said the letters — sent via email — were a breach of the athletes’ right to confidentiality. Even the grounds for the test “were not legitimate,” the Olympic committee’s chief spokesman, Mark Adams, said on Monday because they had not violated the eligibility rules for the competition. “These athletes have been competing in senior competition for six years without any issue,” he said. “They are eligible to compete here and they have competed here.”
As technical issues in the room mounted, so did the confusion over what was being left unsaid. In several heated exchanges, journalists pushed for greater transparency, and some present in the room yelled to the I.B.A. officials on the dais that Khelif was a woman no matter what the results showed.
At one point, into the second hour of the news conference, a second impromptu gathering was taking place inside the same room. As Kremlev was delivering another long response to a question, television cameras encircled Roumaysa Boualam, a member of the Algerian women’s boxing team. Boualam, who was eliminated from the Olympics with a loss in her opening bout last week, said she had come to support Khelif and spoke sternly about how the public scrutiny of her friend’s eligibility had taken its toll.
“Any person being treated like that would feel angry and frustrated,” said Boulam, who was dressed in an Algeria jersey and flashed the North African nation’s flag from a seat near the back of the room.
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