The female category in sport is for women and girls – individuals with XX chromosomes.

Identity is not biology.

To pretend otherwise is not only to make a mockery of any notion of fairness but, in the case of boxing, risk serious injury or worse.

Now, with Algeria’s Imane Khelif said to be on the verge of returning to competition, World Boxing has announced that Khelif, winner of a gold medal at the Paris Games, must take a chromosome test to prove eligibility – in its words, undergo “mandatory sex testing.” 

COSTA NAVARINO, Greece – The International Olympic Committee, founded in 1894, has had nine presidents.

All have been white men. Eight have been Europeans. Avery Brundage, 1952-72, was American.

On Thursday, in just a single round of voting, the IOC elected Kirsty Coventry, 41, of Zimbabwe, its 10th president. She will formally take over from Thomas Bach in June in Lausanne. He was elected in 2013 and is termed out.

COSTA NAVARINO, Greece – Before Thursday’s vote here for the next president of the International Olympic Committee, it’s worth taking a moment to think about what might have been.

And how one of the most shocking deaths in the Olympic scene reverberates, still – with a warning for what is to come in arguably the most consequential IOC presidential election, ever.

It was the summer of 2018, and on the outdoor patio of the Royal Savoy hotel in Lausanne, Patrick Baumann and a few others were enjoying cigars and libations. 

Three months later, he was gone — dead of a heart attack at the Buenos Aires Youth Games.

Larry Buendorf, who for decades kept the U.S. Olympic Committee safe in a turbulent world, died Sunday in Colorado Springs. He was 87.

Buendorf, a former U.S. Secret Service agent well known for breaking up an assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford in 1975, served as the USOC’s director of security from the early 1990s through his retirement in 2018 — seeing the athletes, team and leadership through the 1996 Atlanta Games bombing, the fraught years after 9/11 and so much more. 

His passing marks the end of an era. He was a link to a bygone time at the USOC — now, for that matter, the USOPC. 

Boonie, as he was known by almost everyone, was — unequivocally, irrefutably, no question about it — one of the good guys. 

The IOC is inherently a conservative enterprise given to lip-service when it comes to change. The IOC needs real change.

Like the pictures from Paris this past summer, the veneer suggests that all is well in the Olympic landscape.

But no. The issues and fissures are real.