PARIS — Olympics organizers said Sunday that arbitrary testing imposed on boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting that led to a storm of vitriol misidentifying the women as transgender or men was “so flawed that it’s impossible to engage with it.”
International Olympic Committee spokesman Mark Adams again vigorously defended Khelif of Algeria and Lin of Taiwan, hammering the sport’s now-banned governing body, the International Boxing Association, that claimed the fighters failed unspecified eligibility tests for women’s competition.
The two athletes were “carted off and tested” during the 2023 boxing world championships because “there were suspicions against them,” Adams said, slamming the process that singled them out.
“I need hardly say if we start acting on suspicions against every athlete of whatever, then we go down a very bad route,” he said.
He rejected the testing in its entirety.
“There’s a whole range of reasons why we won’t deal with this,” Adams said. “Partly confidentiality. Partly medical issues. Partly that there was no basis for the test in the first place. And partly data-sharing of this is also highly against the rules, international rules.”
“The whole process is flawed,” Adams added. “From the conception of the test, to how the test was shared with us, to how the tests have become public, is so flawed that it’s impossible to engage with it.”
Lin and Khelif have been at the center of a clash over gender identity and regulations in sports as critics have brought up their disqualification last year. The IBA claimed they failed “to meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.”
The Russian-dominated governing body was given the unprecedented punishment of being permanently banned from the Olympics last year and has not run an Olympic boxing tournament since the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016.
Adams confirmed that the IOC received a letter from the IBA that the 3 Wire Sports website reported concerned Khelif and Lin and, it said, was sent in June of last year to Olympic organizers.
Adams wouldn’t discuss the letter’s contents but reiterated: “Those tests are not legitimate.”
“There was indeed a letter,” he said. ”I’m not going to discuss the individual intimate details of athletes, in public, which I think is pretty disgraceful for those who have leaked that material. Frankly, to be put in that position must be awful. On top of all of the social media harassment that these these athletes have had.”
IOC President Thomas Bach had sought Saturday to draw a line under days of global scrutiny about the female boxers and what he described as a politically motivated “cultural war.”
“We have two boxers who are born as women, who have been raised as women, who have a passport as a woman and have competed for many years as women,” Bach said. “Some want to own a definition of who is a women.”
Bach linked the furor to what he called a wider, Russian-led campaign against the IOC and the Paris Olympics, where only 15 Russian athletes are competing as neutrals. The IOC and international sports bodies have isolated Russia because of the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
“What we have seen from the Russian side and in particular from the (IBA),” Bach said, “they have undertaken already way before these Games with a defamation campaign against France, against the Games, against the IOC.”
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