The sports world is atwitter (sorry for the pun) about an Olympic event this week, one which has opened up questions about the nature of sport and identity.
In the octofinal round of the 66kg women’s boxing category, Italy’s Angela Carini was meeting Algerian boxer Imane Khelif with a berth in the final eight on the line.
Carini, just 45 seconds into the bout, was hit by a Khelif punch. Carini was not knocked down or stunned or bloodied by the blow, but instead turned to her corner.
And she quit.
Yep, I’m going to call it what it is. When you’re a boxer, you’re a person who has trained against sparring opposition and hardened your body with training. That is, unless you’ve been part of one of those “Toughman” competitions, where amateurs sign a waiver and step into a ring to fight a random opponent.
Toughman (or Toughwoman) competitions have the potential for horrendous mismatches, injury, and even death. I remember seeing a segment on women’s boxing on the departed HBO series Real Sports, showing an amateur match which saw an overmatched female boxer being pummeled to the point where she received brain damage. Throughout the tape, the losing boxer stayed and competed and never quit.
Unlike Carini, whose capitulation set off a firestorm of outrage in social media due to the circumstances surrounding Khelif’s boxing history.
That history involves a tale of international boxing regulations and political decisions.
Let’s take the first one. Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting were disqualified from a world championship tournament last year organized by the International Boxing Association for not meeting gender eligibility requirements. Later reporting did not why the boxers failed their gender eligibility tests but did clarify that neither underwent testosterone examinations.
Since then, the IBA has been relieved of its duties as the world governing body of boxing because of ties to Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch. The boxing events at the Paris Olympics are being overseen by the Paris Boxing Union, an ad-hoc group which reports to the International Olympic Committee’s Executive Board.
The outrage over the story came mainly from people who have been ginning up outrage in the social media sphere and in political circles about “banning biological males from women’s sports.” This includes attempts to create martyrdom scenarios for any swimmer who lost to Penn’s Lia Thomas, or high-school runners in Connecticut who lost out to two transgender runners who made the papers.
But two facts undermine their arguments in the boxing scenario at these Olympics. First off, neither Khelif or Lin identify as transgender or intersex. Khelif, specifically, was born female and it is recorded on her passport.
Second Khelif is from Algeria, a country which, in its infinite wisdom, has erected legal barriers to transgender people which are not faced by heterosexual persons. Algeria, like many African countries, has these kinds of laws on people for no other cause than these people are born like they are.
Only in this kind, Khelif was deemed to have been ineligible for women’s boxing by the corrupt IBA, and politicians such as Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni former president Donald Trump have weighed in to make it a gender issue.
The problem is, as we have mentioned on this blog a number of times, governments should not be making these kinds of decisions and they need to be placed in the hands of governing bodies of the sports in question. It is creditable that the world governing bodies of track and field, boxing, and other sports have come up with transparent eligibility without the ham-fisted efforts of politicians.
Politicians which have no right to govern athletic competition..
