Olympics chiefs blame ‘misleading information’ for women’s boxing row
IOC defends decision to include two competitors barred by international federation after opponent abandons fight
The International Olympic Committee has defended its decision to allow two boxers to compete in Paris who had previously been disqualified from the sport’s world championships for failing to meet gender eligibility requirements, saying an escalating row had been fuelled by “misleading information”.
The IOC’s decision to permit Algeria’s Imane Khelif to participate in the women’s welterweight category at the Olympic Games has drawn criticism from Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Earlier on Thursday, Khelif’s Italian opponent withdrew from their match less than a minute after it had begun.
Khelif competed at the Tokyo Games in 2021, but was one of two boxers barred from last year’s world championships by the International Boxing Association for not meeting eligibility criteria to compete as a woman, along with Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting. However, both athletes were cleared to compete in Paris by the IOC. Lin, the featherweight world champion in 2022, is due to fight on Friday.
Complicating matters is the fact that the IBA, the body that disqualified Lin and Khelif, was itself suspended by the IOC in 2019 as the international governing body of the amateur version of the sport, because of concerns about its finances, ethics and governance.
The IOC has since assumed interim authority over boxing at the Olympics, and defended its position on Thursday evening, saying the two athletes in question had been “victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA”.
“We have seen in reports misleading information about two female athletes competing at the Olympic Games Paris 2024,” the IOC said. “The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure — especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years.”
Within the Olympic world, the international governing bodies of each sport determines their own respective rules on athlete qualification, including gender eligibility. World Athletics, the governing body of track and field, changed its rules in recent years to limit the disciplines in which athletes could compete who have differences in sex development, such as the South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya.
Earlier this week, the IBA said it had barred the two boxers from competing after a “meticulous review”, adding: “The decision . . . was extremely important and necessary to uphold the level of fairness and utmost integrity of the competition.” It said the precise nature of the tests conducted during the review were “confidential”, but that both boxers did not have a “testosterone examination” last year.
Earlier on Thursday, Meloni criticised the IOC for what she said was a failure to protect female athletes and safeguard the competition. “With the levels of testosterone in the Algerian athlete’s blood, the competition does not seem fair,” Meloni, who was in Paris to support Italian competitors, told reporters after Khelif’s fight against Angela Carini.
The Italian boxer told reporters that she had withdrawn from Thursday’s match “to safeguard my life”, after Khelif delivered a blow that injured her nose.
The IOC and IBA have been at loggerheads for years over other issues, including the IBA’s move in May to offer prize money to gold medallists in Paris. In response, the IOC reiterated concerns it had about the IBA’s financial ties to Russian energy producer Gazprom. “As always with the IBA, it is unclear where the money is coming from,” the IOC said at the time.
Because of the row between the two bodies, boxing has not yet been included in the programme for the Los Angeles Games in 2028, despite being part of every Summer Olympics, bar one, since 1904.