PARIS — At nearly the precise moment Sunday morning that boxer Lin Yu-ting won an unanimous decision to move to the semifinals, and assure a medal, in the women’s 57kg division at North Paris Arena, IOC spokesman Mark Adams opened a media briefing about 14 miles away in central city.
Adams would have, no doubt, liked to have discussed just about anything other than a women’s boxing firestorm. Sky-high global television numbers? World-record performances by athletes? The iconic, historic venues that have made the 2024 Summer Games so memorable?
Instead, for the fourth consecutive day, the IOC’s briefing was dominated by questions about women’s boxing, gender tests, controversy, culture wars, a battle with the International Boxing Association, Russian-influence and just about everything else.
“This is why this is such an impossible area,” Adams said. “It is a minefield to work in.”
And it is one that the IOC is trying to tap dance through, quite clumsily.
The IOC lacked the foresight that this issue would flare up. As such, it did not — and still has not — come armed with the proper information to credibly and irrefutably discredit the IBA and the disqualifications.
That failure is a significant reason this continues to boil over.
The controversy over the continued participation of Lin and Algeria’s Imane Khelif in the 66kg division is not settling down, no matter the pleas of the IOC.
“We will not take part in a politically motivated … cultural war,” IOC president Thomas Bach said Saturday.
It doesn’t have that option at this point.
Both fighters were disqualified from the 2023 World Championships by the IBA for failing “to meet eligibility rules.”
The IOC originally stated on their online Olympic bios that the disqualifications were for elevated testosterone levels, which Adams called “fact” numerous times Friday even after they were deleted. Meanwhile, IBA President Umar Kremlev told a Russian news agency that the disqualifications were because “it was proven they have XY chromosomes,” not testosterone.
That set off a firestorm internationally. Is this fair? Is this safe? What is happening, especially after Khelif overpowered an Italian opponent earlier in the competition in just 46 seconds.
Many of the questions and concerns come from an honest place. Nobody thinks an uneven playing field should be tolerated anywhere at the Olympics, but especially in a combat sport. You lose a foot race, you lose a foot race. No one is punching you in the face.
It also was seized, however, by opportunists without distinction and perspective. The IOC should have predicted that was coming.
What is clear, as the IOC and others note, is that these are not transgender athletes. At no point in their lives have they ever been categorized or identified as men. Wade into the complicated science of this on your own, but it is possible for someone to have been born with female genitalia and have “xy chromosomes.”
“This is not a transgender case,” Adams said Friday. “There has been some confusion that this is a man fighting a woman. This is just not the case. On that there is consensus. Scientifically this is not a man fighting a woman.”
“We have two boxers who were born as woman [sic], who have been raised as woman, who have a passport as a woman and have competed for many years as woman,” Bach reiterated.
It’s an important distinction because the online abuse directed at the two fighters, who have fought internationally for years, including the 2021 Olympics, has been astoundingly damaging and unfair to them as well.
Even if the IBA’s tests are legitimate (more on that later) Lin and Khelif almost assuredly have done nothing other than to be themselves. They are victims here too.
But what to make of all of this? Should they continue to fight? The IOC says they have “passed” all requirements to fight as women and blasted the IBA as not credible.
The IBA is no one’s definition of an upstanding organization, even by boxing standards. It is heavily linked to Russia and the IOC stripped it of the power to oversee boxing at the Paris Games due to everything from general corruption to alleged judging conspiracies.
The IOC has also barred Russia from officially participating in the last four Olympics due to the massive, state-run doping operation Russia ran during the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi as well as Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine (just 15 athletes of Russian citizenship are here in Paris).
As such, it is not a reach to believe that the IBA is purposefully trying to mess with the Paris Olympics on behalf of Russia.
If so, it’s working.
What we know is that the IBA disqualified the boxers during the 2023 World Championships because they “failed to meet eligibility rules.” Khelif, of Algeria, was barred from competing in the finals just hours before her bout.
A review of the minutes from the IBA decision additionally said that the two “failed” a similar test taken during the 2022 World Championships in Turkey.
Why the IBA would allow two fighters that failed some type of genetic or gender tests in 2022 — tests that it deems worthy of immediate disqualification — but then allow them to compete again in 2023, makes no sense and casts significant doubts on the organization and its credibility.
“If you really believe,” Adams said, “that we should take anything that they say or anything they send us with any grain of truth, then I think … one would be sadly mistaken.”
However, most people just want to know what is the truth here.
The IOC originally discarded the 2023 tests because, as Adams said on Friday, “we have no knowledge of what the tests were.” The implication was that the IBA wasn’t sharing information with the IOC because of their feud.
However, 3WireSports.com reported on Saturday that the IBA sent a letter to the IOC on June 5, 2023, with details concerning the tests, including the lab reports, which the website had reviewed.
On Sunday, Adams acknowledged the IOC did receive that letter, however he continued to dismiss the IBA’s findings because of the lack of protocol, the timing of the tests being during competition, the motivation behind the testing and the fact that the sharing of the information is unethical.
“There was indeed a letter, I can confirm that,” Adams said. “But the tests themselves, the process of the tests, the ad hoc nature of the tests, are not legitimate …
“The test was, as far as we can see, taken arbitrarily, a decision which I’ve seen reported related to the competition where one of the boxers beat a Russian boxer,” Adams continued. “The very fact to do the testing was done on the spot there, under what purpose, under what was the test for?”
All of the above may be true. The IBA can be a sinister and terrible organization willing to destroy the lives of two boxers just to harass the IOC. That is not beneath them. And the tests may have been targeted because of in-ring results unpopular with Russia.
That doesn’t mean the tests were inaccurate though. Perhaps they were. Perhaps not.
As long as the IOC is unable to answer that, or make its case clearly and convincingly, then this isn’t ending. It’s gotten into the mud with the IBA and keeps asking the public to just trust it.
“We try to continue to deliver safe, fair and inclusive sport,” Adams said. “All those three things can be difficult to come together at times.”
The IOC’s heart may be in the right place, but it has been caught completely flatfooted here and naive of the response that came.
“This isn’t a subject where there’s a simple black and white answer,” Adams said. “Should someone, could someone come up with a scientific consensus then we would be happy to work with that consensus. Unfortunately, as you’ve seen over the past few days, there isn’t a consensus.”
That’s the future. In the present, the two fighters in question are headed for the medal rounds as this just gets bigger and bigger, threatening an otherwise illustrious Paris Games.
Source Agencies
