What led to the bitter controversy over an Olympics boxing match?
A mighty punch by an Algerian boxer has revived a politically charged dispute
THE BEST boxing matches often go to the final bell. But in the opening round of a women’s welterweight (66kg) contest at the Olympics, Angela Carini, an Italian boxer, abandoned her bout against Algeria’s Imane Khelif after taking a hard right hand to the head, just 46 seconds in. Ms Carini wept, refused to shake hands, said “it’s not right!” in the ring and said she believed her life was in danger, though the next day the Gazzetta dello Sport, an Italian paper, reported that she later apologised to Ms Khelif and said she would embrace her the next time she saw her.
The reason for the controversy was that Ms Khelif, and a Taiwanese boxer, Lin Yu-ting, had both been banned from competing as women by the International Boxing Association (IBA) after two tests of their eligibility in 2022 and 2023. (Ms Lin also won her first fight, on August 2nd.) Who sets the rules of such cases and how?
Many details are unknown. Ms Khelif has competed only as a female and has always lived as one. She took part in the Olympics in Tokyo in 2021, where she lost in the quarter-finals. The IBA has not said what kind of tests it administered, citing privacy concerns, saying only that they did not include a testosterone examination but a “separate and recognised” test, and that Ms Khelif and Ms Lin had a “competitive advantage”. The head of the IBA, however, once told Russian media that the two had tested positive for XY—that is to say, male—chromosomes.
Some athletes in similarly controversial circumstances have “differences in sex development” (DSD), although no evidence has been presented that the two boxers have this condition. DSD is a range of rare conditions involving genes, hormones and the development of the sex organs and secondary characteristics in a variety of ways. Some such conditions are evident at birth; others can go undiscovered until puberty or adulthood. Some DSDs can confer the sporting advantages of undergoing male puberty. These can include higher bone density, larger hearts and lungs, and increased lean-muscle mass, including as a proportion of any given body-weight.
The most famous athlete with DSD is Caster Semenya, a South African middle-distance runner who won many sporting competitions before athletics rules covering eligibility to compete as women were changed. Along the way Ms Semenya was subjected to intense public scrutiny that revealed she has testosterone levels in the male range, and both internal testes and a vagina. World Athletics determined that her testosterone levels gave her an unfair advantage. To compete, she was told she had to take testosterone-suppression medication. (She believes this requirement was discriminatory and is suing the body at the European Court of Human Rights.) But suppressing testosterone does not eliminate some of the permanent physical changes resulting from male puberty.
The International Olympic Committee does not normally write eligibility rules for sports at the games, instead delegating to the governing bodies for each discipline. But boxing has been an unusual exception. In 2023 the IOC stripped the IBA of its authority to administer boxing at the Olympics: for years it had questioned the quality of the association’s governance and the integrity of its judges. That decision was upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. In a statement on August 1st, the IOC called the tests that the IBA gave Ms Khelif and Ms Lin “sudden and arbitrary”. But its replacement criterion for boxing was merely what sex is listed in an athlete’s passport.
Delegating responsibility to each governing body is meant to ensure that those who know the sport best are the ones to decide how to balance inclusion, fairness and safety. The controversy over the Carini-Khelif bout has brought the last of these, safety, to the fore in a way that previous controversies, over sports like swimming and weightlifting, have not. The IOC says that it would be unjust to change criteria as the games continue. But a growing number of athletes are calling for more scrutiny of those competing in women’s sports. For them, relying on the assertion in a person’s passport is unlikely to be satisfactory.
© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com
Continue reading with HT Premium Subscription
