She came to fight for her country, and ended up a punching bag. So did her sport

The best and the worst of these Games came in a visceral moment of elation and frustration, tearfully expressed by a boxer who came here to fight for her country and ended up a punching bag in a much bigger stoush.

Having exited the ring, sweaty and happy after securing an Olympic medal, Imane Khelif stared defiantly at her questioners and declared in Arabic: “I want to tell the entire world that I am a woman and I will remain a woman.”

Khelif’s arrow could have been aimed at any number of targets: the Italian Boxing Federation, which lobbied to have her kicked out the Games before she fought against their own Angela Carini; Carini herself, after she aborted their bout and kicked off a roiling debate about sex and gender in sport; former US president Donald Trump, gender-critical author J. K. Rowling, the world’s media or the International Boxing Association, which disqualified her from last year’s world championships because of test results it says confirm she has male sex chromosomes.

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was fighting for gold in the 66kg class. Credit: Getty Images

The International Olympic Committee, which claims to be in Khelif’s corner, may have done her and the women she fights against a disservice through its failure to meaningfully engage on the complex question of how to balance fairness, safety, differences in sexual development and gender inclusion in a sport like boxing.

There were six gold medals up for grabs when the women’s boxing competition started in Paris two weeks ago. If Khelif wins her final bout in the 66kg weight class early on Saturday morning Australian time and a second athlete judged ineligible by the IBA, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, wins her final in the 57kg class a day later, one-third of women’s Olympic boxing titles will be held by athletes purported to have XY chromosomes.

The last time we saw something like this at an Olympic Games was the women’s 800m track final in Rio in 2016, when race winner Caster Semenya and the silver and bronze medallists were all differences-of-sex-development (DSD) athletes. That result, and the fears expressed by rival women that they couldn’t catch athletes propelled by naturally high levels of testosterone, prompted World Athletics to embark on a protracted, careful and painful reform of its competition rules.

No one who witnessed the IBA’s shambolic attempt this week to explain its position on Khelif would trust the sport of boxing to do the same.

Khelif, like Semenya, was raised a girl from birth and has always identified as a woman, but the IBA says it has analysis of Khelif’s blood performed by two qualified labs, one in Istanbul and a second in New Delhi, that show she has a typically male karyotype – the biological term for the sequence of chromosomes that determine our make-up – and testosterone levels 10-fold what you would typically find in a woman.

This information was largely lost amid the IBA’s ham-fisted and, at times, offensive presentation of a case which, in its closing arguments, featured IBA president and Vladimir Putin ally Umar Kremlev describing Khelif and Lin as men and inviting speculation on “what they had between their legs”.

The IOC has argued the tests the IBA is relying on are unsound.

Whatever the sport holds for Khelif, this episode has exposed to a global audience the parlous state of boxing and underscores the very real possibility that it may be answering the bell for the last time at an Olympics.

What would it mean if boxing, a traditional sport included in Pierre De Coubertin’s original vision for the Games in 1896, disappeared from the Olympics? And frankly, why should you care?

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Cuba’s gold medallist Erislandy Alvarez Borges, a lightweight boxer who fights in the long shadow cast by revered Olympic pugilists such as Félix Savón and the late Teófilo Stevenson, can’t imagine Olympics without boxing. “I believe this is a sport the whole world admires,” he says fresh from winning his gold medal bout. “Boxing is one of the main sports of the Olympics.”

Canadian welterweight Wyatt Sandford, a bronze medallist in Paris, says if the Olympics scrapped boxing, it would lose one of its most global and diverse sports. “One of my coaches back in the day said it is not skiing – everybody in the world is able to box. It is very important for the athletes, in every country, to have that opportunity.”

Cuba’s latest Olympic boxing champion Erislandy Alvarez Borges jumps for joy after defeating France’s Sofiane Oumiha.Credit: AP

Sofiane Oumiha was born and lives in the southern French city of Toulouse, the same town as France’s swimming superstar Léon Marchand, but their upbringings were worlds apart. Five years ago, he gave his name to a new boxing gym in Papus, one of the city’s most disadvantaged areas.

At the opening of the gym, he said he wanted to give hope to young people in the neighbourhood. “I wanted to give back to boxing everything it has given me since I was nine years old, to show a positive image to the neighbourhood. Everyone can succeed by giving themselves the means.”

Asked after losing to Alvarez Borges how he would feel if boxing was no longer part of the Olympics, Oumiha said simply, it would make him sad. “Boxing is really part of the iconic nature of the Olympics. It would be a shame for young boxers who dream of taking part in the Olympics.”

Boxing has been on wobbly legs at the Olympics since a year before Tokyo, when the IOC provisionally withdrew its recognition of the IBA as an international federation – Lausanne lingo for the organisation that governs and manages sports that are part of the Olympic family. Last year it made final its decision, leaving boxing an administrative orphan.

French boxer Sofiane Oumiha, who grew up in a poor area of Toulouse, says boxing should always have a place at the Olympics.Credit: Getty Images

The IOC extended the sport a temporary lifeline, agreeing to step in and appoint a taskforce to manage the Olympic boxing competitions in Tokyo and Paris. It has since declared that it won’t be doing the same in Los Angeles. “The position is very clear,” says IOC President Thomas Bach. “The IOC will not organise boxing in LA without a reliable partner and if national federations want their athletes to be able to win Olympic medals they have to organise themselves.”

A bitter dispute between Kremlev and Bach meant the prospects of the IBA being welcomed back to the Olympic fold were distant before Paris.

Following the spectacular bust-up over Khelif, the IBA and IOC are blaming each other for a scandal that has overshadowed not just boxing, but much else at these Games. The IOC argues the IBA’s gender rules are arbitrary, the tests it is relying on are unsound, and all an athlete needs to do to establish their gender is show a current passport. Kremlev accuses the IOC of trying to destroy women’s sport.

It is difficult to disentangle this feud from larger forces at play: Russia’s frustration with the IOC at being banished from these Games; Russia’s disinformation war targeting what Putin sees as the decay of traditional values in the West; personality clashes between an arrogant IOC and a Kremlin-backed IBA, and the self-interest of boxing administrators who see their sport inevitably moving to the professional fight game and want to wet their beaks from future broadcast and gambling revenues. The one thing everyone agrees on is the sport is hopelessly balkanised.

A new group

World Boxing, a Swiss-based organisation led by Boris van der Vorst, a former president of the Dutch Boxing Federation, was launched last April as a breakaway group. Van der Vorst was a central figure in boxing’s “Common Cause Alliance”, a reform group that lobbied the IBA leadership to wean itself off sponsorship money flowing into the sport from Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned natural gas company currently subject to boycotts because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Van der Vorst, having previously failed to unseat Kremlev as IBA president, is currently in Paris trying to convince national federations that World Boxing offers the only viable path for boxing to remain an Olympic sport. So far, only 37 of the 203 countries that belong to the IBA have joined World Boxing. The captain of Australia’s boxing team in Paris, Caitlin Parker, is backing World Boxing and joined the organisation’s athletes’ committee.

In the meantime, the IBA, an organisation formerly known as the Association Internationale de Boxe Amateur (AIBA), retains control over amateur boxing outside the Olympics.

If World Boxing can convince the IOC to confer on it the status of international federation for the sport, the implications for Khelif and other XY athletes is unclear. A Word Boxing spokesman said the organisation’s gender inclusion rules “deliberately mirror” those adopted by the IOC in Tokyo and Paris but beyond that, it has work to do.

“We have recognised for some time that gender clarity is an extremely complex issue, with significant welfare concerns and deeply held views,” a World Boxing statement read. “Our medical team is in the process of examining every aspect of this area so that we can develop a policy that prioritises the health of boxers and deliver sporting integrity while endeavouring to ensure the sport is as inclusive as possible.”

This bet-each-way position is in stark contrast to the clear position adopted by the IBA, which rules out anyone with a Y chromosome from competing in women’s sport.

Integrity issues

Ever since the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, the integrity issues plaguing amateur boxing have been hiding in plain sight. Although those Games are best remembered for Ben Johnson’s steroid-fuelled dash in the 100m, they are notorious among fight fans for the final bout of the light-middleweight division when a young American boxer named Roy Jones jnr was robbed of Olympic gold by an absurd decision to award the fight to a hometown fighter, South Korea’s Park Si-hun.

Roy Jones jnr lands another punch against South Korea’s Park Si-Hun at the Seoul OIympics but it wasn’t enough to convince the judges.Credit: AP Laserphoto

Jones went on to become one of the best pound-for-pound boxers of his generation. Park and the Olympic boxing never lived down the embarrassment of what happened in Seoul.

Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, an expert in sports integrity engaged three years ago by the IBA to examine its practices and offer a way out of the mire, tells this masthead that much of the corruption in boxing stems from ringside officiating. In his final report on the AIBA published two years ago, he put it kindly when describing “a culture that has not historically respected ethics and integrity”.

McLaren came to international prominence in the lead-up to Rio when he was asked by the World Anti-Doping Agency to head an independent investigation into allegations of state-sponsored doping by Russian athletes. His report into the AIBA, when read with a separate Court of Arbitration of Court decision backing the IOC’s decision to strip the IBA of its international federation status, provide a rollicking history of the dodgy characters who have controlled boxing, the financial mismanagement that took it to the brink of collapse, and the permissive attitude towards graft and corruption which, as recently as the Rio Games, determined who won and lost Olympic boxing matches.

“The investigation makes it unambiguous that the best written rules and individuals working to ensure integrity were consistently circumvented by individuals in the organisation bent on personal gain,” McLaren concluded in his report. “The system started at the top and rewarded individuals at every level who either had a predisposition for corruption or were manipulated to do so.”

As a case study, consider what happened when former AIBA president CK Wu, in the search of funds for an ill-fated scheme to establish semi-professional World Series Boxing franchises across Europe, the Americas and Russia, turned to a state-controlled Azerbaijani group of companies called Benkons to provide $US10 million in seed money, and a mate from China, Di Wu, to invest another $US35 million.

The Benkons loan was brokered by Azerbaijan Boxing Federation president Kamaladdin Heydarov, who also holds a government position as Minister of Emergency Situations. As a quid pro quo, Wu told his executive director that Azerbaijani fighters were to be looked after by IBA judges and Di Wu was made executive vice-president of the AIBA.

It was only after Wu left the job that his successors opened a safe in his office and read the Benkons loan documents showing the AIBA was guarantor. When the World Series Boxing scheme went nowhere and Benkons called in the loan, it nearly sent the AIBA broke.

If this sounds bad, the person who stepped up as AIBA interim president to clean up the mess was Gafur Rakhimov, an Uzbeki businessman who in 2012 was designated by the US Department of Treasury as the leader of an international crime syndicate and, a decade earlier, was refused on character grounds entry to Australia to attend the Sydney Olympics.

McLaren says while the IBA’s response to his recommendations to improve the integrity of boxing judges and referees is a work in progress, the financial issues inherited from the disastrous World Series Boxing venture are largely resolved. The main sticking point for the IOC is governance and, particularly, the role of Kremlev.

McLaren says reform remains possible and that the IOC, through its support for boxing at the past two Olympics, has shown it wants the sport to continue at the Games. He also thinks there is a compelling reason for this to happen.

“We interviewed referees and judges from all over the world and the one thing we constantly heard is boxing is a very important sport for people who are disadvantaged and don’t live with secure familiar and financial arrangements,” he says. “It is a way out of those circumstances.”

Khelif is testament to this. In how many other sports can a girl born in a remote village outside Tiaret become an Olympian, a UNICEF ambassador and a hero to Algerian women? But her story won’t save Olympic boxing. It has further exposed a moribund sport.

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