Thomas Bach’s latest transgender comments prove absence of IOC direction

Thomas Bach says the gender row that engulfed the Paris Olympics Games was ‘not a real crisis’. Does anyone believe the IOC boss any more?

IOC President Thomas Bach and Former Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk visiting Yeronga Park Sports Centre after the announcement of the 2032 Brisbane Games. Picture: Richard Walker

Does anybody believe Thomas Bach any more? The International Olympic Committee president, who leaves office in June and his successor elected next Thursday, made a most curious statement on Saturday.

He downplayed the gender row that engulfed the women’s boxing at the Paris Olympic Games and insisted “it was not a real crisis”.

Should we expect anything less? Over the past few years the International Olympic Committee, under Bach, has failed to look after half of its membership – females – and Bach has not understood the impact of his decision-making. Not recognising the Olympic boxing calamity issue as a genuine scandal and dismissing fairness in competition as “not a real crisis” is yet another insult.

Female competitors who were smashed by Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting in every round of every bout on their way to win gold medals in the 66kg and 57kg categories at the Paris Olympic Games may contradict Bach’s summation.

So too may young females who may lose team spots, promotions, prizes, money, sponsorship to biological men across a broad range of sports because the German failed to take decisive action from his privileged guardianship role to protect the female category.

We have seen the upheaval that the IOC’s stance – embraced by the medical director Richard Budgett at the Tokyo Olympics who said “everyone knows trans women are women” – which has subsequently led to track and field, cycling and swimming, all having to implement strong rules about protecting biological female sport in the absence of IOC direction.

But Bach then doubled down on his comments, which were given at a Greek seaside resort where the seven candidates standing to replace him have very firm views on the issue. Out is “woke” Bach as the favourites to be the new president: Sebastian Coe, Kirsty Coventry and Juan Antonio Samaranch, all respond to reality of an election, promising elite female sport will be fair and quarantined for biological females only and insisting sports will have clear guidance about it from the IOC’s Lausanne headquarters.

Bach with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In his latest round of interviews Bach didn’t take any responsibility for the boxing controversy nor the blind acceptance of a female passport to define female hood which created such uncertainty in the sport at the Olympics.

However Bach insists the brouhaha was instead “fake news from Russia”.

He conflated some web hacking of the Olympic movement, blamed on Russia – banned from competing at the Paris Olympics for claiming part of Ukrainian territory – as being behind the boxing furore.

It is unclear if he was suggesting that the global outrage of the IOC allowing females to take to the ring against competitors whose sex was undetermined, was some kind of fakery.

Or that the previous boxing authority the IBA, was led by a Russian, Umar Kremlev, and was thus unreliable. Perhaps he was alluding to both.

Bach said: “I would not consider this a real crisis because all this discussion is based on a fake news campaign coming from Russia. This was part of the many, many fake news campaigns we had to face from Russia before Paris and after Paris.”

He added: “It has nothing to do with the reality. These two female focuses were born as women, they were raised as women, they have been competing as women, they have been winning and losing as every other person.”

Except of course he doesn’t really know this because the IOC didn’t conduct any sex testing. Bach even claims there is no reliable scientific way to determine the biological sex of athletes.

This is unlike the IBA, which says it carried out two separate sex tests before sidelining the two boxers from previous world championships and had sent the laboratory results to the IOC many months before the Paris Olympics.

And so we have this bizarre situation that even in the final days, this particular boxing “crisis”, which Bach says is “not real”, is what is actually defining his presidency as being somewhat spurious.