Paris 2024: Who is to blame for boxing's Olympic outcry?

In one corner, you have the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the most powerful institution in world sport.

In the other, you have the International Boxing Association (IBA), amateur boxing's global governing body, which is no longer officially recognized by the IOC.

It offers an insight into how and why the cases of two female boxers competing at the Paris Olympics have been thrust into the public spotlight, exposing a yearslong feud between the two organizations and reigniting a debate over fairness, safety and inclusion in women's sport.

DW looks at what is behind the issues and where boxing and its Olympic competition go from here.

Why exactly is boxing in the spotlight?

Unwittingly caught in the middle of this, through no fault of their own, are the two boxers: Imane Khelif of Algeria and Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting, who are said by the IBA to have failed gender tests during the World Boxing Championships in March 2023, with no information provided as to what the tests consisted of.

Both Khelif and Lin have since become the victims of abuse and false assertions on social media, which has been called "unacceptable" by Andrea Florence, director of the Sports & Rights Alliance, a coalition of human rights groups. 

"The obsessive speculation around women's bodies under the guise of 'fair play' is rooted in harmful gender and racial stereotypes," Florence said.

What is the history of the feud?

The feud between the IOC and the IBA stems from the 2016 Rio Olympics. Allegations of judges fixing fights during the Games in Brazil were confirmed by an independent investigation and led to the IOC demanding that the IBA clean up its act or risk losing its status as a governing body.

As an interim measure, the IOC took over the running of the boxing competition at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, as it has also done here in Paris.

However, far from improving its governance in the meantime, the IBA further angered the IOC when it reelected Umar Kremlev as president without contest in 2022.

Kremlev, a Russian businessman with ties to the Kremlin, has been a vocal critic of the IOC and its president, Thomas Bach, and the IBA was derecognized after an IOC vote in June 2023.

"The boxers fully deserve to be governed by an international federation with integrity and transparency," Bach said at the time.

The consequences of that vote, though, have created a disparity in the way amateur boxing competitions are run and, it appears, their rules. While it is no longer involved at the Olympics, the IBA still controls its world championships, where the controversy erupted. 

"I don't think any of these organizations are models to look at when it comes to boxing," Dr. Joanna Harper, author of the book "Sporting Gender," told DW in an interview.

However, Harper cautioned that "bad actors" had attempted to gain political capital from the situation, adding: "There are some people who are trying to make a political case that people who don't fit easily into the male-female divide are men, masquerarding as women, trying to ruin women's sports. Those people have very bad intentions."

When did the boxers fail their gender tests?

Khelif and Lin were both disqualified from the 2023 World Boxing Championships in New Delhi. The IBA decided that the pair had been ineligible to compete after undergoing gender tests, to uphold "the integrity of the competition."

At the time, Kremlev told Russian state news agency TASS that DNA testing of the two boxers had "proved that they have XY (male) chromosomes," and that they had "tried to deceive their colleagues and pretended to be women."

Khelif had beaten Russian boxer Azalia Amineva in the quarterfinals of the championships.

News of the failed gender tests went largely unnoticed in 2023 but was brought to wider attention just days before Khelif's first Olympic fight in Paris on Thursday.

How has the IOC responded to the IBA?

The IOC has stressed that the boxers are not transgender and has sought to undermine the credibility of the tests, even suggesting that they had something to do with "not liking the results that had happened," apparently referring to Khelif's bout against Amineva. 

"It was an arbitrary decision taken overnight," spokesperson Mark Adams said at the IOC's daily briefing on Friday. 

Adding to the confusion, though, the IOC had written on a portal for the media that Khelif had "elevated levels of testosterone." This information was later deleted, but the IOC acknowledged that it had been taken as "fact." 

Although it remains unclear what exactly their medical condition is, Harper said that the two boxers "probably" have a difference of sexual development (DSD), meaning that they have XY chromosomes and can display characteristics typical to males, including how they respond to testosterone.

Why can the boxers compete in the female category?

The IOC says that the boxing competition in Paris is being conducted under exactly the same rules as the ones in Rio and in Tokyo, where the sex listed on an athlete's passport is the key criteria.

Asked by DW if the IOC, knowing the situation with the gender tests, could have prevented the furor from occuring before the Olympics, Adams said that a different question needed to be asked.

"Are these athletes women? The answer is yes, according to eligibility, according to their passports, according to their history," Adams said.

Those remarks were echoed by Bach at his press conference on Saturday.

"There was never any doubt about them being women," he said. "Some want to own the definition of who is a woman. We will not take part in a politically motivated cultural war." 

However, Harper says the IOC's policy doesn't look at the "significant" safety issue. 

"It's not clear with DSD athletes how much stronger they are on a pound for pound basis," she said. "And in the boxing world, the safety issue comes down to pound for pound strength, because you're putting together people of the same size. I would say if they haven't had testosterone suppression, I would have concerns."

What will happen next?

In the short term, both boxers will continue in their respective catagories in the competition. "You cannot just come out and disqualify somebody and establish the rules afterwards," Christian Klaue, another IOC spokesperson, added on Friday.

In the longer term, the IOC may revisit its overall policy on gender eligibility, although Harper acknowledges that "there is no singular solution that is going to make everyone happy."

Boris van der Vorst, the president of World Boxing, which is positioning itself to take over as the sport's global body, told the Associated Press that his organization would always put "athletes' safety first" when it came to developing policies, but added that "when people are eligible to compete, we have to respect them."

Meanwhile, critics of Kelif's and Lin's participation in the female category have called for boxers to be sex tested, a practice that was stopped at the Olympics before the Sydney Games in 2000.

Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch backs the IOC on this matter. "So-called 'sex tests' of women athletes and Olympians are unscientific, degrading, discredited, abusive, and never happen to men," she said.