IOC Defends Female Boxers After Right-Wing Gender Outrage

The International Olympic Committee defended its decision to allow two female boxers—Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting—to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics and criticized conservatives for the “abuse” hurled at the pair after they went viral online.

The situation gained international scrutiny on Thursday after Italy’s Angela Carini tapped out of a match with Khelif after only 46 seconds, exclaiming “it’s not fair” after a particularly hard hit from her Algerian opponent.

Prominent figures including J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk and Logan Paul have all weighed into the gender storm while promoting inaccurate information about the situation.

Both Khelif and Lin were disqualified by the International Boxing Association (IBA) during the 2023 world boxing championships in New Delhi for failing to meet gender eligibility tests—but the IOC claimed that organization, which was banned from the Olympics for corruption, made a “sudden and arbitrary decision,” therefore allowing the pair to compete.

Khelif, 25, has always competed as a woman, including at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, where she crashed out during the quarterfinals. There is no indication she identifies as transgender, telling Unicef in March that as a 16-year-old that “she managed to excel in football in her rural village in Tiaret in western Algeria despite football not being seen as a game fit for girls.” According to Unicef, “Ironically it was her ability to dodge the boys’ punches that got her into boxing.”

In a statement released on Wednesday after the Khelif-Carini bout, the IBA said Khelif and Lin were disqualified due to “failure to meet the eligibility criteria for participating in the women’s competition.” The organization said the two boxers did not undergo a testosterone exam, but were “subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential.” The IBA only said the boxers had “competitive advantages over other female competitors.”

In its statement Thursday, the IOC accused the IBA of disqualifying Khelif and Lin “without any due process” by the IBA’s secretary general and CEO.

“The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure—especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years,” the IOC said.

“Every person has the right to practise sport without discrimination,” it added.

“We have seen in reports misleading information about two female athletes competing at the Olympic Games Paris 2024... The IOC is saddened by the abuse that the two athletes are currently receiving.”

The IBA has courted controversy for years and was suspended by the IOC as boxing’s governing organization in 2019 after allegations of corruption and medal fixing at the 2012 Games in London and the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.

An independent investigation, led by Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, found that IBA officials manipulated bouts at the Rio Olympics for “money, perceived benefit of AIBA [the IBA’s name prior to 2021], or to thank National Federations and their Olympic committees, and, on occasion, hosts of competitions for their financial support and political backing.”

The IOC formally stripped the IBA of recognition in 2023 for failing to address these concerns. Since then, a rival organization known as World Boxing has been campaigning for the sport in the Olympics.

Dozens of boxers, including Khelif, have since moved to World Boxing. In their statement on Thursday, the IBA claimed that “World Boxing, whose sole purpose of existence is to support the Olympic movement, has equally endorsed and reinforced ineligible athletes to compete in their very own recently announced events.”

Three sources also told the Washington Post that Khelif was banned by the IBA only one day after defeating Russian boxer Azalia Amineva in the competition’s semifinal bout.

Since 2020, the IBA has increasingly been tied to Russia—whose Olympic Committee was banned from participating in the 2024 Paris Olympics due to the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, which began only days after the 2022 Winter Games concluded in Beijing.

Current President Umar Kremlev–who is Russian–was elected in 2020. For years under Kremlev’s leadership, the IBA’s only sponsor became Gazprom—the Russian state-owned oil company.

It is unclear if Gazprom is still a primary sponsor for the organization. The IBA announced it would match prizes won for medals at the Paris Games, but the IOC claims they would not reveal where they were getting the money.

“This total lack of financial transparency was exactly one of the reasons why the IOC withdrew its recognition of the IBA,” the IOC said in a statement in May. “The IBA was not prepared to transparently explain the sources of its financing or to explain its full financial dependency, at the time, on a single state-owned company, Gazprom.”