But the IOC took no action
The International Boxing Association speaks up.
The IBA sent a letter to the International Olympic Committee in June last year, warning of the safety risks that women could face at the Paris Games against a fighter who had already failed sex tests. But the IOC took no action, instead allowing Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, a second boxer whose results suggested the same difference in sexual development, to sweep to Olympic titles without losing a single round. Three months on, as the IOC pours scorn on fresh reporting in France about “unverified documents whose origin cannot be confirmed”, the IBA is mounting a staunch defence of the accuracy of its testing procedures.
“It was a chromosome test, to check for XX or XY, and these two boxers didn’t meet the eligibility criteria, because they both fell into the XY category,” Chris Roberts, the IBA chief executive, tells Telegraph Sport. “They were tested twice, in 2022 and 2023. When you receive a secondary laboratory test with the same results, demonstrating that both boxers are ineligible, it’s clear. What comes with it is our obligation and our duty of care to the other athletes.”
A serious obligation and duty of care, because if you put a male boxer in the ring with a female boxer, you are putting the female boxer in extreme danger.
Roberts is unsparing in his argument that the IOC failed to uphold any such duty, with president Thomas Bach insisting with increasing desperation that womanhood could be determined by passport status alone. “In my opinion, Bach has taken two gold medals away from the other two finalists,” he says. “He has a heck of a lot to answer for. I find his comments totally disrespectful. How do you compete as a woman based on a passport? You or I could change our passports to do that.
“We support women’s right to compete against women. In a hard sport, women shouldn’t be subject to anything outside those criteria. When women are going to compete for a gold medal at the Olympic Games, they don’t need another obstacle in the way, an obstacle that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. And these two boxers ended up winning gold medals in both categories.”
It wasn’t fair, and it was dangerous.
There is also the question of why the IOC remains so dismissive about sex tests as a concept, given that Reem Alsalem, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said last month that they should be mandatory so that women’s events were ring-fenced for those born female.
I’m afraid it’s the usual reason. Women don’t matter. Women aren’t really among the downtrodden, they just pretend to be because they’re Karens.
In a report presented to the General Assembly in New York, she wrote: “There are circumstances in which sex screenings are legitimate and proportional in order to ensure fairness and safety in sports. At the Paris Olympics, female boxers had to compete against two boxers whose sex as females was seriously contested, but the IOC refused to carry out a sex screening. Current technology enables a reliable sex screening procedure through a simple cheek swab with non-invasiveness, confidentiality and dignity.”
Why did the IOC refuse?
And it’s not even that the final standings in the women’s boxing should be adjusted upward one place. There’s nothing to say that the women boxers eliminated in the first round by these cheating men would not have advanced to high ranks in the tournament. They could even have been the legitimate gold medal winners. Men’s cheating spoils ALL the results.
Indeed, @maddog1129, it’s even possible that the correct winner wasn’t even at the Olympics, having been knocked out by Khelif or Lin at a qualifying tournament.
As to the IOC’s refusal to test, that’s possibly because boxers having any chromosomes at all, or any testosterone levels didn’t breach the IOC rules. What revealing XY chromosomes or male typical testosterone levels would have done though, is create a more transparent furore, and the IOC wanted this furore as complicated and confusing as possible.