It was a telephone call to Dr Emma Hilton, the developmental biologist whose work illuminates why sex matters in sport, that gave a first inkling as to the freight train hurtling down the tracks. Given her research had illustrated the average man could punch 162 per cent harder than a woman, I had wanted to establish what, to put it bluntly, the International Olympic Committee was playing at by allowing two biologically male boxers into the female category. “They are trying to balance fairness, inclusion and safety,” she said. “But safety isn’t about balance. Safety is a cut-off. If it’s not safe, nobody cares if it’s fair or inclusive. You can’t do it.”
The very notion of these fighters competing in Paris as women seemed indefensible. Not least when footage from 2022 surfaced of one of them, Algeria’s Imane Khelif, hitting a Mexican opponent so hard that the beaten Brianda Tamara reflected: “I don’t think I had ever felt like that in my 13 years as a boxer, nor in my sparring with men.” Surely the IOC would intervene before the first scheduled bouts for Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting? Surely it was unconscionable to permit boxers deemed ineligible for last year’s world championship due to tests revealing XY chromosomes, the male pattern, into combat with women?
Dr Hilton’s warning of the danger came on Monday, July 29. But far from heeding it, the IOC did nothing. Almost two weeks on, its inertia and flat denial of science has enabled both Khelif and Lin to sweep to Olympic titles, each achieved with four lopsided victories. Mired in politics and blinded by ideology, it has presided over the perfect storm of a scandal. “They are women”: this, all along, was president Thomas Bach’s incantation about Khelif and Lin, which is what they consider themselves to be. And yet he still cannot even present a persuasive definition of what a woman is.
To Bach and his IOC acolytes, in hock to a belief that your sex is whatever you say it is, womanhood can be determined by passport status. Except athletes do not compete at the Olympics using legal documents or self-declared gender identities. They compete using their bodies, with their capabilities governed by the immutable laws of human biology. And so when the International Boxing Association wrote to the IOC 14 months ago, disclosing that Lin and Khelif were XY, the arbiters of global sport were duty-bound to investigate immediately, to demand test results of their own.
The decision to brush that letter aside was purely political. The IOC disavowed the IBA five years ago, citing worries over its finances and governance, and no longer trust anything the organisation says. The upshot is that, for the past two Games, it has run Olympic boxing itself, overseeing the 2024 instalment through an ad-hoc body called the “Paris Boxing Unit”.
It has been a recipe for confusion and turmoil. The major sports are all controlled here by federations that have seen sense, prioritising fairness by ring-fencing the female category for biological women. Athletics acted in response to seeing three athletes with differences in sexual development on the women’s 800 metres podium at Rio 2016. Swimming understood it had a problem when Lia Thomas went from being the 554th-ranked male in the United States to winning a national collegiate title as a female. Cycling was forced to draw a line when Austin Killips, a post-puberty male, won a UCI stage race for women. But boxing, the most perilous sport at the Olympics, has been left at the mercy of the IOC, the most ideologically captured body of all.
It saw no issue in sending Angela Carini into the ring to face Khelif, only for the Italian to be dismantled inside 46 seconds by punches so hard she said she feared for her life. It was not just because it disputed the IBA’s findings, but because it believed the Algerian should never have been tested at all. Its much-vaunted eligibility “framework” is rights-led rather than scientific. This means, in essence, that it is prepared to ignore anything to do with Khelif’s chromosomes. All that matters is being perceived not to discriminate.
Naturally, the IOC ridiculed the IBA’s now-infamous Paris press conference, where technical gremlins beset the audio and where president Umar Kremlev stood by a slur on Bach as a “sodomite”, a comment in relation to the opening ceremony which was taken by some to include a parody of The Last Supper. But this all became a giant exercise in misdirection. While there are serious points to make about the IBA’s shambolic operations, this does not disguise the fact that the foundations of its case – that women’s sport must be XX, that male advantage in boxing is insuperable – are valid.
It is worth studying the precise details of the IBA letter describing the tests carried out on the boxers. Summarising the results as “abnormal”, it declares: “Chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype.” It also includes imaging, for each athlete, of an X and a Y chromosome, highlighting that the tests were conducted at a Delhi laboratory certified by the Swiss-based International Organisation for Standardisation. But still the IOC maintains that the results are “arbitary”, not worth the paper they are written on.
The only possible conclusion is that the IOC simply does not want to listen, that it is more interested in burnishing its credentials as “inclusive” than in upholding what is fair. It is no wonder that Bach wanted to be nowhere near the boxers’ gold-medal presentations, instead delegating Khelif’s victory ceremony to Mustapha Berraf of Algeria, one of his arch-loyalists. He has, frankly, made himself foolish on this issue. He had been warned for six years that a story such as this could explode if the IOC did not draw clearer boundaries, but still he refused to react. Despite the IBA claiming that the fighters have been tested twice and that they are male, Bach insists there is no scientific means of discovering who is female.
Now, not before time, he has agreed to step aside next year, his credibility severely damaged by his handling of the controversy. It marks the dramatic culmination of a quite extraordinary episode. In the space of a single Games, the IOC has done nothing less than distort biological truth in a sport fraught with physical risk. In the eyes of many women, there could scarcely be a greater dereliction.
