Questions and answers: The Olympic women’s boxing gender controversy

Forty-six seconds of a boxing match was all the world needed to sidetrack the 2024 Olympics into a heated controversy about the gender of two women in the field: Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan.

That bout, which ended when Angela Carini of Italy quit against Khelif,​​ spawned intense interest in numerous questions, some of which have clear answers and some of which don’t. The subjects include questions about the women themselves, philosophical queries about how sports approach gender and practical questions about how boxing tournaments and the Olympics are run.

Here’s what we know and a large caveat: Some elements of the situation are unclear or unknowable.

Who is Imane Khelif?

Khelif, 25, is competing at the Paris Games in the 66-kilogram (145-pound) division and has clinched at least a bronze medal. She finished in fifth place in the 60-kilogram (132-pound) division at the Tokyo Games.

She is 39-9, including one professional bout. She has notable past losses in the 2021 Olympic quarterfinals and in the 2022 world championship finals. Khelif won silver at the 2022 world championships and gold medals at the 2022 African championships, 2022 Mediterranean Games and 2023 Arab Games.

How do the Olympics classify Khelif’s gender?

International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials have said the Games primarily rely on passports along with other official national documentation and medical clearances to distinguish men’s and women’s divisions in boxing and many other sports. Some sports have additional requirements.

Khelif was assigned female on her birth certificate and has always been identified on her legal documents as a woman, according to the IOC. She has lived her entire life as a woman and is listed as a woman on her passport, IOC spokesman Mark Adams said Friday.

“My child is a girl. She was raised as a girl,” her father, Omar Khelif, said in a video published Saturday by Sky News. “She’s a strong girl. I raised her to be hardworking and brave.”

Algerian law does not allow people to change their gender on official documents or otherwise, according to Equaldex, a website that tracks LGBTQ laws by country for travelers.

“This is not a transgender case,” Adams said, later adding: “Scientifically, this is not a man fighting a woman.”

Who is Lin Yu-ting?

Lin, 25, is in the 57-kilogram (126-pound) division. She beat Svetlana Kamenova Staneva of Bulgaria in the quarterfinals Sunday to clinch at least a bronze medal.

Lin also competed in Tokyo, finishing in ninth place in the 57-kilogram (126-pound) division. She is a two-time gold medalist at the Asian championships, a two-time gold medalist at world championships and won a gold medal at the 2022 Asian Games.

How do the Olympics classify Lin’s gender?

Like with Khelif, Olympic officials have repeatedly said Lin has met every benchmark to fight in a women’s division.

Lin was registered as female on her birth certificate, according to Cho Kuan-ting, a city council member in New Taipei who spoke with the Taipei Times.

“Lin is registered as a female on her birth certificate. The test result from last year was not even about chromosomes,” Cho said. “It took her years of hard work to get to where she is today … She has proven herself to be the pride of Taiwan.”

So what is the controversy?

Khelif and Lin are competing after they were disqualified from the 2023 women’s boxing world championships. At those championships, they failed what the International Boxing Association (IBA) characterized as gender eligibility tests.

But written details of the tests have not been officially released and the IBA’s administration of the championships has been heavily criticized. This week, the association issued a statement that described the tests using only vague terms.

“The athletes did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential,” the statement said. “This test conclusively indicated that both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.”

How did things escalate?

Attention turned quickly to Khelif and Lin when they were cleared to compete in Paris.

The IOC is overseeing boxing at the 2024 Games after the IBA was stopped from running the Olympic tournaments in 2019. There were numerous disputes, including allegations of unfair judging and a lack of financial transparency by the IBA. In April, the IBA tried to force the IOC to let it run Olympic boxing, but lost its challenge with the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The administrative spat led to the IBA and the IOC throwing barbs at each other when they had differences in how they handled the eligibility of the boxers.

Then things really boiled over when Khelif fought Carini. Carini conceded 46 seconds into the bout after squarely taking a hard punch, officially abandoning the fight. It’s unusual – though not unprecedented – for boxers to give up in that way. It’s akin to throwing in the towel, as some corners do to concede fights.

Carini says she is sad about the controversy that has emerged. Immediately after the bout, she said she couldn’t continue given the intense pain she endured from Khelif’s punches.

Why is there confusion about the gender tests?

This is where things get murky.

After the world championship disqualifications in 2023, IBA president Umar Kremlev told the Russian state-owned news agency Tass that Khelif and Lin had X and Y chromosomes. Based on DNA tests, he said, “it was proven that they have XY chromosomes.”

According to the National Institutes of Health: “The Y chromosome is most commonly associated with male individuals, but the Y chromosome does not singularly define a person’s sex.”

Kremlev accused the boxers of trying to deceive their competition by pretending to be women.

According to the National Health Service in England, the presence of X and Y chromosomes in women can only be determined with chromosomal testing, usually given in the form of an ultrasound or a blood test.

It is not known if Khelif or Lin underwent such testing because the IBA has not shared more details about the tests.

The IOC has also raised objections to how the tests were carried out and administered, in part because Khelif and Lin were determined to be ineligible only after they had clinched world championship medals.

Why do details about biology matter?

This cuts to the heart of so many of the most complex questions about gender and sport. These are subjects that illuminate disagreements, filled with details that aren’t always simple to find or explain.

Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC, has a job that requires him to regularly talk about these issues publicly. Yet even he had an example of the danger of imprecision on Saturday.

Initially, he said during a news conference that Khelif and Lin were not examples of athletes with differences of sex development, or DSD, a broad term used for people who are born with characteristics that do not strictly fit into long-held associations with descriptions of males and females. Minutes later, the IOC sent a correction and said Bach had misspoken. He meant to say instead that the athletes were not transgender, as he had in earlier remarks, the IOC said.

So much of the online discourse around the boxers has included false assumptions about their genders, prompting comparisons with a wide range of sports that have a wide range of rules set by their federations.

Bach said that the IOC would not take part in what he called a “politically motivated, sometimes politically motivated, culture war.”

And he repeated the IOC’s calls for national boxing organizations to unite under a new umbrella that is not the IBA to agree on better rules.

What happened during the brief fight?

Less than you might think.

Khelif and Carini touched gloves as the fight started. They opened with pawing jabs to zero in their range. Khelif took control of the center of the ring and landed a short uppercut. Carini actively counterpunched but put her left hand up 36 seconds in to get her headgear readjusted.

After the brief pause, Carini ate a stiff right straight from Khelif. She put her left hand in the air again to concede.

Khelif’s punch wasn’t delivered particularly forcefully. But it landed flush as Carini had opened up her stance and lifted her chin while throwing a weak hook.

Will Khelif and Lin be disqualified from the Olympics?

Probably not.

The IOC released a statement Thursday reiterating that every athlete in the boxing tournament complied with the Games’ eligibility and entry regulations. On Friday, Adams said the 2023 disqualifications rendered Khelif and Lin victims “of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA.”

Those positions make it highly unlikely that Khelif and Lin would be disqualified on the basis of gender in the middle of their Olympic tournaments.

On the contrary, Khelif clinched at least a bronze on Saturday with a win against Anna Luca Hamori of Hungary. There was some posturing but it played out mostly like a normal fight, with Khelif taking a unanimous decision.

“Eligibility rules should not be changed during an ongoing competition and any change must follow appropriate processes and should be based on scientific evidence,” Adams said.

How have Khelif and Lin directly reacted?

Their public comments have been very limited and not focused on gender.

“I am proud of this win, especially for my country Algeria here in Paris,” Khelif told beIN Sports on Saturday after she clinched the bronze. “I have been preparing eight years for this Olympics.”

She briefly spoke with reporters after defeating Carini, saying: “Difficult for a first fight. Insh’allah for the second fight.”

Khelif posted an Instagram photo of her smiling in the ring Thursday after her win and shared the IOC statement from Thursday on her Facebook page.

Lin spoke after her win over Staneva about the support she has received.

“A lot of people cheered me on in Paris and also in my country,” she said. “I received a lot of supporting messages. I did not read them because I shut down my social media platforms. I am going to take this strength all the way to the end.”

Who is Umar Kremlev and why is the IBA at odds with the IOC?

Kremlev has overseen the IBA since 2020 and has some ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In May, a report from a Chinese state-run television network said Kremlev was part of a Russian delegation chosen by Putin to promote sports in China.

The IBA has also had financial backing from the Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom, which it announced in 2021 as a sponsorship that would help keep it from insolvency.

And during these Games, the IBA has been defending its choices and needling the IOC.

On Friday, Kremlev said the IBA would award Carini prize money as if she were an Olympic champion. “I couldn’t look at her tears,” Kremlev said in a statement. “I do not understand why they kill women’s boxing. Only eligible athletes should compete in the ring for the sake of safety.”

The IBA has been the governing body for most of the sport’s international competitions, though in the fractured world of boxing that doesn’t cover headline professional bouts like the ones fans would normally buy on pay-per-view. Those are generally put on by individual promotional companies.

The IBA was the first international federation to lose its IOC association.

Along with allegations of manipulating bouts at the 2016 Olympics, the IBA promised to hand out more than $3 million in prize money to fighters and teams in Paris in 2024. That led the IOC to issue an ultimatum: Countries who stayed loyal to the IBA could be barred from competing in boxing at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

“This total lack of financial transparency was exactly one of the reasons why the IOC withdrew its recognition of the IBA,” the IOC said in May.

How did the 2023 world championship play out?

On March 23, 2023, Khelif rolled past Janjaem Suwannapheng of Thailand to qualify for the world championship finals. But hours before the final the next day, Khelif was disqualified (Suwannapheng fought instead and lost).

​​”There are some countries that did not want Algeria to win a gold medal,” Khelif told Algerian Ennahar TV after the tournament. “This is a conspiracy and a big conspiracy, and we will not be silent about it.”

Earlier in the same tournament, she had defeated the Russian boxer Azalia Amineva.

Also on March 23, Lin fell to Kazakh boxer Karina Ibragimova in the semifinals and clinched a bronze medal. Lin was stripped of that medal the next day.

On Friday, the IOC said Khelif and Lin were not given any due process.

What’s left for Khelif and Lin at the Paris Games?

Khelif’s semifinal on Tuesday is actually a rematch with Suwannapheng of their world championship semifinal. The finals for their division are scheduled for Friday.

Lin will next face Turkey’s Esra Yildiz in the semifinals on Wednesday. The final is Saturday.

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(Photo: Mohd Rasfan / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)