A boxer at the centre of the gender eligibility storm at the Paris Olympics wrote her name on the floor of the ring on Saturday, and burst into tears after securing an Olympic medal.
Algeria’s Imane Khelif was overwhelmed with emotion and repeatedly slammed the floor of the ring with her hands, having beaten the Hungarian fighter Luca Anna Hamori convincingly in the quarter-final of the 66kg category. After the fight, Hamori congratulated her opponent and wished her luck for the remainder of the competition. Asked about the controversy, she said: “I don’t care.”
The 25-year-old Khelif is now guaranteed Algeria’s first boxing medal since 2000, after winning the three-round bout 5-0 by unanimous decision, with the prospect of the gold medal in her sights. She faces Thailand’s Janjaem Suwannapheng in the semi-finals on 6 August.
Khelif and the Chinese Taipei fighter Lin Yu-ting have come under intense scrutiny at these Games. Both fighters competed without incident at Tokyo 2020, but were disqualified from last year’s world championships at a late stage by the International Boxing Association (IBA) for failing to meet its gender eligibility criteria. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has cast doubts on the tests taken, calling the disqualifications “arbitrary”, while the IOC president Thomas Bach said the boxers had been subjected to “hate speech”.
In Paris on Saturday, Khelif entered the ring to deafening cheers from a large Algerian contingent. She dominated the fight but, afterwards, was in tears as she walked past a scrum of international journalists.
Yacine Arab, the sport manager of the Algerian Olympic Committee, said Khelif had not had her phone with her in the last 24 hours, in a bid to shield her. “This controversy is a joke,” he said. “Everybody knows that Imane was born a girl. She [fought] all her time as a girl, all the competitions she was a girl. When she was losing, nobody talked about this.”
Before the fight, the father of the Algerian boxer said criticism of her was “immoral” and “not fair”. Amar Khelif told Reuters: “Having such a daughter is an honour because she is a champion, she honoured me and I encourage her and I hope she will get the medal in Paris. Imane is a little girl that has loved sport since she was six years old.”
The IBA, led by Umar Kremlev, a Russian national, and funded by the sanctioned company Gazprom, is not running the Olympic boxing competition after it was expelled from the Olympic movement for failing to reform judging and refereeing, and over financial stability and governance issues. Kremlev said of the fighters last year that DNA tests had “proved they had XY chromosomes and were thus excluded”.
However, the gender eligibility of the two boxers remains unclear. The IOC criticised the IBA for changing its gender rules in the middle of the 2023 world championships. It has said it is happy for both fighters to compete under the less strict gender eligibility rules, based on their passports that were in place for the Tokyo Games in 2021. The IOC stopped blanket sex testing in 1999.
Prior to the fight on Saturday, Bach said: “We are not talking about the transgender issue here. This is about a woman taking part in a woman’s category. But I repeat here this is not a DSD case.”
The IOC subsequently tweeted that Bach had meant to say that this was not a transgender case.
“Differences of sex development” (DSD) describes conditions that occur early in pregnancy in which sex development is not typical. It was previously known as “intersex”. The term transgender refers to people whose current gender identity differs from the sex they were registered with at birth.
Before Saturday’s bout, the Hungarian Boxing Association said it had protested to the International Olympic Committee and was investigating the possibility of legally challenging Khelif’s presence at the Games.
Speaking after the fight, Hungarian Olympic Committee member Balázs Fürjes was more conciliatory. “As loyal members of the International Olympic family we are 100% convinced that the International Committee will make the right decisions,” he said. He did not provide details about what a “right” decision would be.
