Imane Khelif scandal brings everlasting shame on the IOC

Yahoo

2 days ago

'I can sleep well tonight,' said Nicola Adams, the first British woman to win an Olympic boxing title, a few hours after Imane Khelif's test results were leaked into the public domain. She deserved to feel at peace. After all, she had been one of the highest-profile critics of the Algerian's involvement at the Paris Olympics last summer, writing: 'People not born as biological women should not be able to compete in women's sport.' For this she was pelted like some medieval miscreant in the stocks, accused by many of her former supporters of ignorance and misinformation. Except now, with the release of chromosome analysis from an Indian laboratory revealing that Khelif has 'male karyotype', it turns out Adams was right all along.
The Khelif scandal should be ranked among the worst in Olympic history, a saga where the sport's most powerful administrators became so seduced by gender ideology, so in thrall to the lie that womanhood was reducible to some frivolous passport detail, that they were prepared to put the very lives of female boxers in peril. A woman could, as a direct consequence of a profoundly flawed official policy, have died in that Paris ring. That is the stark truth. The International Olympic Committee knew about Khelif. It had been told in 2023 about the test results in New Delhi indicating that Khelif was biologically male, with spokesman Mark Adams publicly admitting as much. But it did nothing, disdaining the tests – with no evidence – as 'ad hoc' and 'not legitimate'.
Its spin was that it was all some Russian stitch-up. This version of events, after all, suited president Thomas Bach's personal squabbles with Umar Kremlev, Russian chief of the International Boxing Association. And it was swallowed by far too many credulous observers in Paris. When the IBA called a press conference, in the wake of Khelif's 46-second battering of Angela Carini, it was blocked by legal threats from revealing the boxer's test findings as it intended. As such, the occasion dissolved into a slanging match: at one point, apropos of nothing, a reporter demanded to know the salary of Chris Roberts, the IBA chief executive.
It felt, then as now, like a huge exercise in misdirection. Yes, the IBA had questions to answer over its ethics and finances. But the core element of its case – that women's sport should only be for those with XX chromosomes, that male advantage was immutable – was sound. And now we see its argument that it disqualified Khelif from the 2023 World Championships for being XY – a verdict, crucially, against which the athlete did not appeal – substantiated in writing, with a report carrying the letterhead of Dr Lal Path Labs in New Delhi summarising the genetic testing in two telling words: 'abnormal' and 'male'.
I spent much of Monday pursuing the IOC, asking firstly for a response to the document and secondly for a sign of whether it would be apologising to the women denied Olympic medals. Eventually, on Tuesday morning, the following word salad arrived from Lausanne: 'The IOC has always made it clear that eligibility criteria are the responsibility of the respective international federation. The factors that matter to performance are unique to each sport, discipline and/or event. We await the full details on how sex testing will be implemented in a safe, fair and legally enforceable way.'
This statement, somehow managing to avoid either question posed, is risible in myriad ways. For a start, the attempt to pass the buck to the federations is directly contradicted by the IOC's actions at the Paris Games. It took over running Olympic boxing from the IBA, establishing the so-called 'Paris Boxing Unit' and applying its own fatuous logic that Khelif and Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting, who had also failed tests, could compete because of the 'F' in their passports. As for its comment about rules being different depending on the sport? Clearly, it still believes men can be women in certain circumstances. In boxing, though, there was only one by which it needed to abide: to ensure women would not be smashed in the head by biological males. And it failed to uphold even that most basic duty of care.
It is a monumental dereliction, to which the only natural response is anger. The IOC has caused havoc with its ridiculous 2021 framework on 'fairness, inclusion and non-discrimination', stating that 'athletes should be allowed to compete in the category that best aligns with the self-determined gender identity'. In 2024, it decided to test this fallacy in boxing, the most lethal Olympic sport. Except boxers do not compete with their feelings, but with their fists. In its desperation to advertise supposedly progressive credentials, it placed women in mortal danger. Could there be a greater betrayal?
Those who cheered this on in Paris, who painted anybody doubting Khelif's claims to be a woman as a bigot, should take some time to reflect. And that includes many journalists. On Sky Sports News on Friday, an Olympics reporter, reacting to news that World Boxing would compel Khelif to undergo further sex testing to compete in the female category again, said flatly: 'There were no tests. There were no test results.' And yet there were. We knew of their existence in Paris nine months ago, and now we have seen them with our own eyes.
In a curious way, there is some comfort in this. When people accuse anybody disagreeing with them on this subject of 'hate', it is a sure sign that they have lost the plot. And those insisting that Khelif's mental health matters more than the physical well-being of women have emphatically lost any moral argument. Think of it this way: in men's sport, people devote inordinate amounts of time to railing against the tiniest example of unfairness, to decrying the entire VAR system if Erling Haaland's toe happens to be offside. How can the same judges make their peace with women being denied the right to safety, the most basic fairness of all? 'Non è giusto', Carini kept saying to her corner in Paris after the Khelif bout, weeping that she had never been punched so hard in her life. 'It's not fair.' Let that plaintive cry stand as a monument to the IOC's everlasting shame.
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