Imane Khelif from Algeria triumphed in her initial Olympic boxing match when her opponent, Angela Carini of Italy, withdrew after only 46 seconds. Khelif’s disqualification from the 2023 world championships, due to failing a gender eligibility test, has made her participation in the Paris Olympics a contentious topic.
Both Khelif and Lin were admitted to Olympic boxing competitions. Admission rules in this case are handled by the so-called Boxing Unit, which has ensured that all athletes participating in the Games’ boxing tournament comply with the rules of eligibility and registration for the competition as well as all medical regulations, which also includes the appropriate demonstration of medical certificates stamped and verified to at least three months before the start of the competitions. These boxers are completely eligible. They are women on their passports, they are women who have competed in the Tokyo Olympics and have been competing for many years, I think we all have a responsibility to tone it down and not turn it into a witch hunt,” said IOC spokesperson Mark Adams, at a news conference on Tuesday.
Nevertheless, high-profile individuals on social media criticized Khelif’s involvement in the Games. X owner Elon Musk echoed a tweet from swimmer Riley Gaines stating, “men don’t belong in women’s sports.
The fact is that Khelif is participating in the Games because she is allowed to by the rules and has passed the IOC’s standards. “The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision,” said the Boxing Unit and IOC in a statement Thursday, referring to the IBA ban. “[It] 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 controversies of the past few days took serious issues such as hyperandrogenism—the excessive production of testosterone by female bodies—and intersexuality, in which someone is born with sex characteristics that don’t fit neatly into traditional definitions of male and female and debased them. They then further poisoned an already very sensitive debate around transgender women’s participation in the Olympics and sports competitions in general.
