Paris 2024 women's boxing stirs so much emotion -- can facts take back the moment?
PARIS – If they had been running the tournament here at the Paris Games, International Boxing Assn. officials said Monday, the Algerian and Chinese Taipei fighters now in the medal rounds in women’s boxing, both figuring in a worldwide controversy, would never have been in the ring in the first instance.
That’s because, IBA officials said, both Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Yu Ting Lin of Chinese Taipei were disqualified at the 2023 IBA women’s world championships in New Delhi upon DNA tests that showed evidence of XY chromosomes – that is, a marker each is male.
The International Olympic Committee, which is overseeing Paris 2024 boxing, opted to base eligibility on an athlete’s passport. IBA officials suggested Monday that missed the mark, noting that as of June 2023, more than a year before these Paris Games, the IOC knew about the New Delhi DQsIn boxing, asserted Gabriele Martelle, chair of the IBA coaches commission, “When there is an unfair advantage, people can die.” He also said, “We had two cases of disqualification,” adding a moment later, “They were publicly banned because of the rules.” And: “This is a sport. We have rules. If you cannot comply, I am sorry. It’s not discrimination. It’s just the rules.”
3 Wire Sports has seen the test results and a June 5, 2023 IBA letter to the IOC that says tests of Khelif, one in New Delhi, a prior test in Istanbul at the 2022 world championships, “concluded the boxer’s DNA was that of a male consisting of XY chromosomes.”For both Khelif and Lin, the New Delhi test – from, as IBA disclosed Monday, the independent Dr Lal PathLabs – consists of three pages. In part:
The first page provides, along with basic identifying information for each athlete and date and time of sample collection, result summary – “abnormal” – and interpretation – “chromosome analysis reveals Male karyotype.” The second page offers photographic representation of the 22 paired autosomes and then, for each athlete, further depicts an X and a Y chromosome. Page three makes plain that the lab is a “national reference lab” and, as well, accredited by CAP, the Northfield, Illinois-based College of American Pathologists, and certified by the ISO, the Swiss-based International Organization for Standardization.
Noteworthy: two considerable ironies.
First, the IOC has gone to considerable lengths in promoting the Paris Olympics as a Games of female equality. For the first time in Olympic history, on the field of play it’s 50% female, 50% male.
And yet a controversy erupted over athletes testing as XY in women’s boxing.
Which the IOC knew about, in June 2023. There is no dispute about that. None.
Second, perhaps almost no institution on Planet Earth is as rule-bound as the International Olympic Committee. This only makes sense. The Olympic Games are often said to be the most complex endeavor human beings undertake in peacetime. To make a Games work, rules, policies, guidelines, and procedures are needed.
Yet the thrust of the controversy in women’s boxing centers on just that – a rule.
The question is, which rule? And why?
The IOC’s position is that the “gender and age of the athletes are based on their passport.”
Which raises this inquiry: why this would the passport be the basis for the IOC’s eligibility for boxing at these Games, given that some number of the international federations, which run the sports at an Olympics, have moved considerably to implement targeted rules on the matter of who is eligible in the female category?
As Duke law professor Dorian Lambelet Campbell writes in a lengthy piece published Saturday in Quillette, the IOC is “at odds” with leading federations such as World Aquatics and World Athletics, whose rules, adopted in recent years, “prioritize fairness and the preservation of the female category for female athletes.”
May 2023: IBA produced a new Rule 4.2.1: “Boxers will compete against boxers of the same gender, meaning Women vs. Women and Men vs. Men as per the definitions of these Rules.”
That updated version of the rulebook said, “‘Women/Female/Girl’ means an individual with chromosome XX. For this purpose, the Boxers can be submitted to a random and or targeted gender test to confirm the above, which will serve for gender eligibility criteria for the IBA Competitions.”More here including documents-
https://www.3wiresports.com/articles/2024/8/5/fa9lt6ypbwx5su3z20xxnfzgtao0gy Why did the IOC allow these men to compete as women when they were disqualified from the world championships in 2023 for being male?
You don't need to go to Olympics to see Algerian man bashing women you can see that on the streets of Europe.
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