The International Olympic Committee was warned in writing more than a year ago that Olympic women’s boxer Imane Khelif had the DNA of a “male”.
Mark Adams, spokesman for the IOC, confirmed the existence of the International Boxing Association (IBA) letter, leaked to the 3 Wire Sports website on Sunday.
Khelif and Lin Yu-ting have been at the centre of a storm, sweeping into their boxing semi-finals despite previous IBA disqualifications for gender eligibility.
However, it has now emerged that the IBA – which has been repeatedly criticised by the IOC – told the Olympics in June last year of its test results on Khelif.
One test in India last year and a prior test in Turkey in May 2022 “concluded the boxer’s DNA was that of a male consisting of XY chromosomes,” the IBA correspondence in June 2023 said.
‘Tests are not legitimate’
On Sunday, the IOC confirmed receiving a letter from the IBA last year, and did not dispute the contents of it during multiple questions at the daily press conference. However, the body insisted that the tests should be regarded as illegitimate as they were conducted on an ad-hoc basis in the middle of last year’s World Championship.
“First off, it won’t surprise you to know I’m going to repeat the line that those tests are not legitimate tests,” said Adams.
“So there was indeed a letter. I can confirm that. But the tests themselves, the process of the tests, the ad hoc nature of the tests are not legitimate. And you will also expect me to tell you that I’m not going to discuss the individual intimate details of athletes in public, which I think is pretty disgraceful for those who have leaked that material, frankly. To be put in that position must be awful. On top of all of the social media harassment that these athletes have had.”
Adams was speaking as Taiwan’s Lin faced protests from her opponent as she was guaranteed a medal at the Paris Olympics.
As Lin swept into her semi-final just as easily as Imane Khelif had done the night before, losing Bulgarian opponent Svetlana Staneva pulled off her gloves, pointed to herself and made a double tap X symbol with her fingers. The Bulgarian’s coach had also been holding a white piece of paper with the words “I only want to play with women I am XX” scrawled on it.
Fairness-for-sport campaigners have been outraged by fights in recent days, with both boxers easing past their opponents.
But IOC president Thomas Bach and his spokesman Adams have poured scorn on the IBA for allegedly fuelling the flames around the furore. The IOC and the IBA organisations have been at war since 2019, when the IBA was suspended as the body leading Olympic boxing.
On Saturday, the IBA announced it would award prize money to Angela Carini, whose fight against Khelif was ended in 46 seconds, “as if she were an Olympic champion”.
Adams said that the IBA, run by Moscow-born administrator Umar Kremlev, has “no credibility”. The IBA was stripped of its status as boxing’s world governing body last year. That decision came four months after the body disqualified Khelif and Lin from the 2023 World Championships. Kremlev last year described the IOC leadership as “prostitutes in sports who get involved in politics”.
Dispute between IOC and IBA intensifies
The IOC’s war with the IBA is likely to escalate on Monday as the boxing body is hosting a press conference in Paris to set out its evidence.
Adams, however, indicated he sees “no reason for the test” that took place to decide the two boxers’ gender last year. “The test was as far as we can see taken arbitrarily,” he said.
“The decision which I’ve seen reported is also related to the competition where one of the boxers beat a Russian boxer, and I don’t know if there’s any truth in it. I know that the boxer did beat a Russian but the very fact that the decision to do the testing was taken on the spot there. Under what purpose the test was for, I don’t know. We managed to do away with sex testing in the last century.”
He acknowledged there was an “ongoing debate” around protections for women’s sport “not just in boxing”, but “nobody wants to go back to the days of sex testing”.
The IOC-IBA dispute is at the centre of an existential threat facing boxing at LA 2028. Mike McAtee, USA Boxing’s executive director, is among the IBA’s fiercest critics. He suggested to the Washington Post that Kremlev would ultimately like to see “Olympic-style boxing fail”. Instead it is World Boxing, which McAtee helped to form, which the IOC hopes will one day run Olympic boxing.
Last Monday, when Telegraph Sport was among the first outlets to report on the two cases, the two IBA disqualifications were reported openly in footnotes on the Paris 2024 official biographies. By Friday morning, however, those IBA tests had vanished in the two athlete profiles, replaced by a link to the latest lengthy IOC statement.
Source Agencies
