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 DQs.
IBA CEO Chris Roberts at Monday’s news conference // IBA
In 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.
The news conference, a rowdy nearly two-hour affair, marked the latest twist in the furor that has enveloped the women’s boxing tournament at the Paris 2024 Games.
In holding the conference, the IBA sought to advance facts amid a swirl of high emotion. At issue is whether facts can take back the moment, or how long the tangle of passions that have elevated the 2024 Olympic women’s boxing tournament to a place of global primacy will continue to dominate the conversation.
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.”
There is no evidence this is the case but a reasonable question would obviously be: how hard is it to forge a passport?
Virtually every teen girl in America knows how, and where, to get a fake ID – typically, a bogus driver’s license.
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 Doriane Lambelet Coleman 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.”
Getting in the way of this sort of sensible, matter-of-fact discussion – and, to be direct, the application in boxing in particular of such a rule for athlete safety – is the tumult that has erupted here.
Part of this has to do with the political dispute between the IOC and the IBA, which ultimately saw the IOC banish the IBA in June 2023. Ordinarily, the IBA would have been in charge of boxing at the Olympics. But because of the politics, the IOC ran boxing in Tokyo in 2021 and is doing so again at the Paris Games.
The root of the political dispute is the IOC’s relationship – or lack of one – with Russia, personified by IBA president Umar Kremlev, who is not only Russian but has ties with top Russian leadership.
Kremlev tends to say what he thinks. A moment from Monday’s news conference would encapsulate this. One of the questions to Kremlev: did he refer to Bach as a “sodomite” and was that appropriate? Speaking by video link, Kremlev declared that he – Kremlev – was speaking as a devout Christian and the remark was sparked by his views of IOC conduct: “I think they have been making fun of Christianity and the Bible.”
No question this sideshow had entertainment value.
But what did it have to do with competition rules or XY test results?
Meanwhile, because of Kremlev’s Kremlin relationships, some significant number of media outlets are highly disinclined to believe anything the IBA says. Because almost no journalists in the Western media have spoken to Kremlev personally, fewer still have reason to trust a word he says. This why-trust-the-IBA is a position the IOC has explicitly sought to encourage – indeed, not disputing that the IBA told it in June 2023 about the XY tests but saying, essentially, without offering evidence on the point itself about the tests, that nothing the IBA says is credible.
This is why getting to the facts in this matter is so essential.
And, too, why it’s hugely frustrating for not only so many of the ladies and gentlemen of the press – as well as keen readers and viewers – who want to see the tests, but cannot, because of privacy reasons.
Which IBA officials made clear at Monday’s news conference.
Indeed, Chris Roberts, the federation’s chief executive, said the IBA had gotten be-careful letters over the past 24 hours from the national Olympic committees of Algeria and Chinese Taipei.
With all of that as backdrop, facts, and in this context it is helpful in assessing the documents to turn to a saying that any first-year law student knows: res ipsa loquitur.
This means: the thing speaks for itself.
Put another way, whatever the noise, the test results say what they say.
Lin has been competing in IBA events since 2017, Khelif 2018.
Following “many complaints from several coaches,” IBA said in a statement it also put out Monday, the two boxers “agreed to gender testing.”
At the Istanbul worlds in 2022, each gave a blood sample. Collection was made May 17, one at 1:38 p.m., the other at 1:39 p.m. The independent Sistem Tip Lab, which as the IBA statement notes carries license No. 194-MRK, issued reports May 24.
For both athletes, there is a summary on page 2 that says the same thing. Translated per Google from Turkish:
“Result: In the interphase nucleus FISH analysis performed on cells obtained from your patient's material, 100 interphase nuclei were examined with the Cytocell brand Prenatal Enumeration Probe Kit. An XY signal pattern was observed in all of them.”
At those Istanbul worlds, Khelif was the 63-kilogram silver medalist, Lin the 57-kilo gold medalist.
In its statement, IBA said the sole Istanbul test was “not enough to make a decision with respective consequences,” reasoning that with “one test, [a] mistake is possible.” It said lawyers “advised to monitor the situation and to contact the IOC.”
It asserted it informed the IOC but got no response.
“The situation was completely new to boxing, and IBA, following numerous consultations, decided to conduct a second testing before disqualifying the boxers,” it said. This is problematic because, at that moment, after the Istanbul worlds, heading to New Delhi, the IBA had no specific rule about athletes for which it had evidence of XY chromosomes. “However,” the statement goes on to say, “the second testing could only be conducted in a neutral country and within the IBA competition period.”
Thus, at the 2023 women’s words in New Delhi, a second test for each. This is the Dr Lal PathLabs test. Blood from both athletes was collected at 10:30 a.m. on March 17. Reports were produced March 23.
As IBA said in its statement, “The findings were absolutely identical to the first test results.”
On March 24, the then-IBA chief executive, George Yerolimpos, told Khelif and Lin they were going to be disqualified. They signed documents acknowledging they were being excluded per IBA Rule 4.2.1. The test details “were attached to the letter,” the IBA said.
Letter to Khelif in New Delhi at the 2023 world championships that IBA says Khelif signed // courtesy IBA
At the time, per IBA competition rules effective February 9, 2023, Rule 4.2.1 said simply, “IBA has the right to make a final decision regarding a Boxer’s eligibility.”
On March 26, the IBA board of directors ratified the Yerolimpos decision to DQ both fighters.
“We are not allowed to publish these documents without the agreement of the person concerned,” the IBA said. “However, both Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting received a copy of these tests, and they never disputed it. They know these tests exist and it is not,” meaning they are not, “fake.”
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.”
On June 5, 2023, IBA sent a letter to IOC sports director Kit McConnell regarding the matter.
On June 16, McConnell sent a reply acknowledging receipt of the June 5 letter.
Both athletes, meantime, were afforded the chance to appeal the DQs to the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Lin did not appeal. So, the IBA’s position is the disqualification in Lin’s case “became legal and binding.”
To follow IBA logic – Lin is still, under its rules, DQ’d. Thus, if it were running the tournament here, Lin would not be eligible.
Khelif initially appealed. On July 27, 2023, after Khelif did not opt to pay to continue the case, CAS said it was over.
Same logic — here, Khelif would be ineligible.
Separately, Khelif provided a “number of medical documents which were examined by the IBA Medical Committee.” It is unclear what the scope or nature of these documents might be.
On March 23, 2024, IBA’s Medical Committee issued a report. On April 12, IBA confirmed Khelif was ineligible.
Zip forward to the Olympics.
On July 31, 2024, the Italian boxing federation – after Angela Carini had stopped her fight here against Khelif, 46 seconds and two punches in – sent an email to IBA asking about “the facts that led to Khelif’s disqualification.”
On August 1, IBA issued a statement that included this:
“We absolutely do not understand why an organization would put a boxer at risk with what could bring a potential serious injury within the Field of Play (FOP). The main role of the referee is to manage the boxer’s safety at all times. How is this reasonably practical when a boxer fails to meet the eligibility criteria to compete?”