The International Olympic Committee was warned in writing over a year ago that female Olympic boxer Imane Khelif had the DNA of a “male” person.
IOC spokesman Mark Adams confirmed the existence of the letter from the International Boxing Association (IBA), which was leaked to the 3 Wire Sports website on Sunday.
Khelif and Lin Yu-ting were the center of attention, reaching their boxing semi-finals despite earlier disqualifications by the IBA on the basis of gender.
However, it has now come to light that the IBA – which has been repeatedly criticised by the IOC – informed the Olympics about the test results on Khelif in June last year.
One test in India last year and an earlier test in Turkey in May 2022 “concluded that the boxer’s DNA was that of a male and consisted of XY chromosomes,” the IBA correspondence said in June 2023.
‘Tests are not legitimate’
On Sunday, the IOC confirmed it had received a letter from the IBA last year and did not dispute its contents when questioned several times during the daily press conference. However, the body maintained that the tests should be considered unlawful because they were conducted on an ad hoc basis in the middle of last year’s world championships.
“First of all, it won’t surprise you that I’m going to repeat the phrase that those tests are not legitimate tests,” Adams said.
“So yes, there was a letter. I can confirm that. But the testing itself, the process of the testing, the ad hoc nature of the testing is not legitimate. And you will also expect me to tell you that I am not going to discuss the individual intimate details of athletes in public, which I find quite scandalous, to be honest, for those who leaked that material. It must be awful to be put in that position. On top of all the social media harassment that these athletes have had.”
Adams spoke as Taiwan’s Lin faced protests from her opponent after she was assured of a medal at the Paris Olympics.
As Lin advanced to her semifinal as comfortably as Imane Khelif had the night before, losing Bulgarian opponent Svetlana Staneva removed her gloves, pointed to herself and made a double-tap X symbol with her fingers. The Bulgarian’s coach had also held up a white piece of paper with the words “I only want to play with women, I am XX” scrawled on it.
Advocates of fair sport have been outraged in recent days by the fights, in which both boxers defeated their opponents with ease.
But IOC President Thomas Bach and his spokesman Adams have lambasted the IBA for fanning the flames of the controversy. The IOC and the IBA organizations have been at war since 2019, when the IBA was suspended as the governing body of Olympic boxing.
On Saturday, the IBA announced it would award prize money to Angela Carini, whose bout with Khelif was finished in 46 seconds, “as if she were an Olympic champion.”
Adams said the IBA, led by Moscow-born executive Umar Kremlev, had “no credibility.” The IBA was stripped of its status as boxing’s world governing body last year, four months after the body disqualified Khelif and Lin from the 2023 world championships. Kremlev last year described the IOC leadership as “prostitutes in the sport who meddle in politics.”
Dispute between IOC and IBA intensifies
The battle between the IOC and the IBA is likely to escalate on Monday as the boxing federation holds a press conference in Paris to present its evidence.
However, Adams said he sees “no reason for the test” that took place last year to determine the gender of the two boxers. “The test was random as far as we can see,” he said.
“The decision that I saw reported also has to do with the match where one of the boxers beat a Russian boxer, and I don’t know if there’s any truth to that. I know that the boxer beat a Russian, but the fact that the decision to do the test was made on the spot, was made on the spot. What the test was for, I don’t know. We managed to abolish the sex test in the last century.”
He acknowledged that there is an “ongoing debate” about protecting women’s sports “not just in boxing”, but “nobody wants to go back to the days of gender testing”.
The IOC-IBA dispute is at the heart of an existential threat to boxing in LA 2028. Mike McAtee, executive director of USA Boxing, has been one of the IBA’s fiercest critics, suggesting to the Washington Post that Kremlev would ultimately like to see “Olympic boxing fail.” Instead, it is World Boxing, which McAtee helped found, that the IOC hopes will one day run Olympic boxing.
Last Monday, when Telegraph Sport was one of the first media outlets to report on the two cases, the two IBA disqualifications were openly noted in footnotes on the official Paris 2024 biographies. By Friday morning, however, those IBA tests had disappeared from the two athletes’ profiles, replaced by a link to the latest lengthy IOC statement.
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