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 hay’s 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 question whether the narrative reverberating around the globe – “The IBA says they failed gender tests, so they must be men boxing women” – is either accurate or complete.
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.
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 Yu-Ting 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? 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 clear 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 Yu-Ting have been competing in this sport for years, including the Olympics three years ago. Khelif lost in the quarterfinals, and Lin lost in the round of 16 of a different weight class.
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
