More from Oliver Brown on the raging trash fire of the Olympics:

The very notion of these fighters competing in Paris as women seemed indefensible. Not least when footage from 2022 surfaced of one of them, Algeria’s Imane Khelif, hitting a Mexican opponent so hard that the beaten Brianda Tamara reflected: “I don’t think I had ever felt like that in my 13 years as a boxer, nor in my sparring with men.” Surely the IOC would intervene before the first scheduled bouts for Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting? Surely it was unconscionable to permit boxers deemed ineligible for last year’s world championship due to tests revealing XY chromosomes, the male pattern, into combat with women?

Because this is boxing you see. It’s not only that the women will lose, it’s that it’s dangerous. It’s not dangerous just in the normal way of serious sport – you could fall or crash into each other or take a puck to the face, all by accident – but in the not so normal way that hitting each other as hard as possible is the goal. In other sports you’re not supposed to hit on purpose; in boxing you are. Boxing of all sports should be the most adamant about not letting men pretend to be women so that they can bash women free of reproach.

To Bach and his IOC acolytes, in hock to a belief that your sex is whatever you say it is, womanhood can be determined by passport status. Except athletes do not compete at the Olympics using legal documents or self-declared gender identities. They compete using their bodies, with their capabilities governed by the immutable laws of human biology. 

And when they compete in boxing they compete using their fists to punch. Not their legs to run, their feet to kick a ball, their arms to pull the string on a bow, but their fists to punch.

The major sports are all controlled here by federations that have seen sense, prioritising fairness by ring-fencing the female category for biological women. Athletics acted in response to seeing three athletes with differences in sexual development on the women’s 800 metres podium at Rio 2016. Swimming understood it had a problem when Lia Thomas went from being the 554th-ranked male in the United States to winning a national collegiate title as a female. Cycling was forced to draw a line when Austin Killips, a post-puberty male, won a UCI stage race for women. But boxing, the most perilous sport at the Olympics, has been left at the mercy of the IOC, the most ideologically captured body of all.

It saw no issue in sending Angela Carini into the ring to face Khelif, only for the Italian to be dismantled inside 46 seconds by punches so hard she said she feared for her life. It was not just because it disputed the IBA’s findings, but because it believed the Algerian should never have been tested at all. Its much-vaunted eligibility “framework” is rights-led rather than scientific. This means, in essence, that it is prepared to ignore anything to do with Khelif’s chromosomes. All that matters is being perceived not to discriminate.

But of course to discriminate can be crucial. It’s not always an invidious word. It became a kind of euphemism for racism in the US during the Civil Rights movement, but in fact we discriminate all the time, because it’s absolutely necessary. You want to discriminate between flour and insecticide, for example. Sport absolutely needs to discriminate between women and men, and that goes double for the Olympics.

It is worth studying the precise details of the IBA letter describing the tests carried out on the boxers. Summarising the results as “abnormal”, it declares: “Chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype.” It also includes imaging, for each athlete, of an X and a Y chromosome, highlighting that the tests were conducted at a Delhi laboratory certified by the Swiss-based International Organisation for Standardisation. But still the IOC maintains that the results are “arbitary”, not worth the paper they are written on.

The only possible conclusion is that the IOC simply does not want to listen, that it is more interested in burnishing its credentials as “inclusive” than in upholding what is fair.

How did we get to a place where a certain narrow warped idea of “inclusion” takes precedence over fairness, equality, the rights of women? Just by endless repetition? Say “inclusion” enough times and boom, the door to the secret kingdom slowly creaks open?

[Bach] had been warned for six years that a story such as this could explode if the IOC did not draw clearer boundaries, but still he refused to react. Despite the IBA claiming that the fighters have been tested twice and that they are male, Bach insists there is no scientific means of discovering who is female.

Now, not before time, he has agreed to step aside next year, his credibility severely damaged by his handling of the controversy. It marks the dramatic culmination of a quite extraordinary episode. In the space of a single Games, the IOC has done nothing less than distort biological truth in a sport fraught with physical risk. In the eyes of many women, there could scarcely be a greater dereliction.

Goddam right.