The International Olympic Committee stood by its decision to allow two boxers who failed gender tests at last year’s women’s world championships to compete at the Paris Games, saying they are “women on their passports” despite reportedly being biological males.
Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) are scheduled to fight this week in the women’s competition even though they were deemed ineligible at the 2023 Women’s World Championships by the International Boxing Association, which said they have XY chromosomes.
Khelif, 25, will face off Thursday against Italy’s Angela Carini in the 66 kg weight category. Yu-ting, 28, is slated to compete Friday in the 57 kg weight category against Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova in the preliminary rounds.
Mark Adams, spokesperson for the International Olympic Committee, said Tuesday that their passports identified the athletes as women and that they have competed for years against women — including at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.
“They didn’t just suddenly arrive. They competed in Tokyo, and I won’t go into any results or so on, but you can probably find out,” Mr. Adams said at a press conference. “I would just make the point that they were eligible by the rules of the federation, which was set in 2016 and which worked for Tokyo to compete as women, which is what they are, and we fully support that.”
He said that questions about whether they have an unfair physical advantage from higher testosterone and undergoing male puberty need to be determined by the international governing bodies for each sport, adding that “it’s incredibly complex.”
“The federation needs to make the rule to make sure that there’s fairness, but at the same time, that there’s an ability for everyone to take part who wants to. That’s a difficult balance,” Mr. Adams said. ‘But in the end, the experts for each sport and each discipline are those people who work in that, and they know very well where there is an advantage, and if there’s a big advantage, that’s clearly not acceptable.”
Advocates of single-sex female sports such as All-American swimmer Riley Gaines predicted disaster.
“As if the Satanic display at the opening ceremony [wasn’t] enough, the Olympics glorifies men punching women in the face with the intent of knocking them unconscious,” Gaines, host of OutKick’s “Gaines on Girls” podcast, posted on X. “Imane Khelif is 1 of 2 male boxers fighting women at the Olympics. A woman is going to die.”
The two fighters were deemed ineligible at the March 2023 world championships in New Delhi by the International Boxing Association after they were found to have XY chromosomes, according to the Russian news agency TASS.
“Based on the results of DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to deceive their colleagues and pretended to be women,” IBA President Umar Kremlev told TASS. “Based on the results of the tests, it was proven that they have XY chromosomes. Such athletes were excluded from the competition.”
Both boxers have enjoyed years of success in women’s boxing. At the Tokyo Olympics, Khelif made it to the women’s quarterfinals before losing the match.
Yu-ting, a two-time world champion, was stripped of the bronze medal at the competition in the 57 kg category, as reported by the Taiwan News.
The report offered a possible explanation for the disqualification, saying that because women fighters seek to adjust their menstrual schedules, they “may take certain medications that impact their hormonal levels, possibly leading to the abnormality with Lin’s gender test results in this case.”
In June 2023, however, the IOC banished the association from the Olympics over judging integrity and financial issues, and relegated authority over boxing to the Paris 2024 Boxing Unit, an ad hoc body with no clear policy on transgender eligibility.
The IOC spokesman @Marq says determining if athletes should compete in the mens or womens category is “incredibly complex.” The IOC ended sex-verification testing at the Sydney Games in 2000. pic.twitter.com/K08TAW5H53
— ICONS (@icons_women) July 30, 2024
In a statement Tuesday, the IOC referred to its 40-page “Event Regulations” for boxing, which require each athlete to produce documents such as a passport and a medical certificate approved within the last three months.
“The PBU used the Tokyo 2020 boxing rules (enforced at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 and the related qualifying tournaments) as a baseline to develop its regulations,” the IOC said in the statement to The Washington Times. “Those rules descended from the Rio 2016 rules.”
In 2021, the IOC washed its hands of the transgender-participation issue by announcing that it would defer to the international sports federations on eligibility criteria.
The committee came under criticism at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics for rules that permitted the participation of New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, the first openly transgender athlete to compete against women.
The IOC eliminated sex-testing at the 2020 Sydney Olympics, according to the Independent Council on Women’s Sports.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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