Jake Paul rips ‘sickening’ Olympic boxing match, offers help to female fighter: ‘This is a travesty’

Jake Paul said Italian Olympian Angela Carini’s defeat at the hands of a fighter who failed a sex test needn’t be the last time she sees a boxing ring.

The high-profile fighter joined the chorus of denunciation Thursday of the lopsided boxing match, widely derided as a man fighting a woman.

“This is sickening. This is a travesty. Doesn’t matter what you believe. This is wrong and dangerous,” Mr. Paul wrote on X to a video of the 46-second match.

Imane Khelif of Algeria battered Ms. Carini with punches that she said were harder than anything she’d ever felt fighting women, and Mr. Paul’s blasting of the contest was the overwhelmingly dominant reaction among fighters who commented on social media.

But he offered Ms. Carini an olive branch, a chance to fight a woman on one of his cards, which regularly rake in millions in pay-per-view fees.

“To Angela Carini although your dreams couldn’t come true today because of the crazy agendas that are at play in our world at the moment, I would love to offer you to fight on an MVP undercard, to show the world your talents on a fair platform and not against a man,” he wrote.

He asked the “Internet” to “help this find her.” He later wrote a similar tweet in Italian.

After Thursday’s fight was stopped and the result announced, Ms. Carini fell to her knees in the ring in tears, declined to shake Ms. Khelif’s hand and decried the bout as an injustice.

Ms. Khelif is not transgender — which is illegal in overwhelmingly Muslim Algeria.

But the fighter was disqualified from the last boxing world championships, reportedly for testing positive for XY chromosomes and having testosterone levels typical of a man.

Algerian sports officials defended her by citing the case of Caster Semenya, a two-time Olympic gold medalist who unsuccessfully challenged the 2018 World Athletics restrictions on athletes with a “Difference of Sexual Development” known as 46, XY from elite women’s meets.

Individuals with 46, XY are often born with ambiguous or female genitalia and raised as girls. But they also have internal testes, undergo male puberty and have male-typical hormone levels — and thus the body of a man.