‘I feel sad for these boxers’: The Australian caught up in Olympics gender row

The International Boxing Association’s Australian director believes there should have been further investigation into the eligibility of the two female fighters embroiled in a gender row at the Paris Olympics, saying she doesn’t agree with them being called male.

Kristy Harris, who represented Australia at the 2014 and 2022 Commonwealth Games, has boxed against Lin Yu-ting of Chinese Taipei, one of the athletes at the centre of the eligibility furore that has gripped the Games, losing to Lin in the semi-finals of the world championships in India six years ago.

Kristy Harris is the only Australian on the board of the International Boxing Association.Credit: Instagram

The retired Victorian defended the decision of the IBA to disqualify Lin and Algeria’s Imane Khelif during the 2023 world titles in Delhi after they failed gender eligibilty tests.

But she said she felt desperately sorry for Khelif and Lin over the firestorm they had been subjected to over their participation in France, saying they should have had more support.

The two were permitted to compete by the International Olympic Committee, which has organised the boxing in Paris after stripping the Russian-led IBA of Olympic accreditation and branding its gender-testing process as illegitimate.

“We made the decision on the information that was passed on to us, and the recommendations from the doctor on our board. [We thought] ‘this is serious’ because boxing is a contact sport and a combat sport,” Harris told this masthead.

Lin Yu-ting, left, fights Bulgaria’s Svetlana Staneva in their women’s 57kg quarter-final.Credit: AP

“Males are going to have a physical advantage in any sport really, but especially when it comes to contact sport, when you’re trying to take someone’s head off. So it was like, OK, if this is what is it, and this is what the results are telling us, and this is what the doctor is supporting ... then that’s why the decision came in to ban them from that tournament.

“It would have been really good for this to be looked into further and, obviously, I hope there becomes a big review of it across the world, in all sports, for everyone to have a better understanding about it.”

An emotional Khelif, who will fight for a gold medal after progressing on Wednesday to the final of the women’s 66kg division, has declared in France:“I want to tell the entire world that I am a female, and I will remain a female.”

Lin, meanwhile, will box on Thursday morning for a spot in the women’s 57kg gold medal bout, lining up opposite Turkey’s Esra Yildiz Kahraman in a semi-final.

IOC president Thomas Bach has maintained both are eligible as they were born and raised as women, had passports as women and had boxed throughout lengthy careers as women.

The high controversy at North Paris Arena and Roland Garros Stadium, the boxing venues, has come amid an escalating dispute between the IOC and the outcast IBA, on whose board Harris sits as an independent director rather than as a delegate of Boxing Australia, which last year defected to the breakaway World Boxing.

Imane Khelif has told the world she is a woman.Credit: Getty Images

Its president is Russia’s Umar Kremlev, who has branded IOC president Thomas Bach as “evil” and during an appearance by video link at a chaotic IBA press conference in Paris this week said the Olympic body was responsible for “the corruption of women’s boxing”.

“The tests showed they were men,” said Kremlev, whose comments were backed by Ioannis Filippatos, a Greek former head of the IBA’s medical committee.

The IBA has said it also carried out chromosome testing on boxers, including Khelif and Lin, in 2022 that had produced inconsistencies.

But endocrinologists and sex development say that chromosomes do not fully dictate gender and Harris said she was well aware what determines a male and a female “is not black and white at all”.

Harris, left, smiles after a bout at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham in 2022.Credit: Getty Images

She does not agree with the characterisation of them as male. “It’s not something that’s my view and I would have definitely approached it in a different way if it was up to me,” said Harris, who is one of 18 IBA board members. “We’re a board. We’re all going to have different opinions. We’re from all over the world.”

But Harris said it was up to medical professionals to “somehow draw the line between what’s fair and what’s dangerous” and hoped there would be better protocols in the future to help tackle the complexity of the issue.

“The biggest thing for me is I feel really sad for these boxers,” she said. “I think people have just grabbed a hold of it. They’re humans at the end of the day. There’s always two components of it. It’s looking after the safety in sport … but it’s also doing it in a respectful and sensitive manner. And not only that, actually supporting these athletes who are going through that.

“I think the sporting bodies need to have something better in place to prevent these poor people getting humiliated like this.”

As for facing Lin in 2018, she didn’t give gender a thought.

“I sparred her in 2012 in an-all female camp as well,” Harris said.

“Because Lin was so much taller than me, people were like, ‘I thought you were fighting a boy for a second’. But as a boxer you don’t think about that. In boxing, a lot of girls look like tomboys anyway. You just go in there and do your job, and you just hope that you get a fair fight.”

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