OAN Staff Blake Wolf
12:31 PM – Friday, August 2, 2024
A second Olympics boxing controversy arose after Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting won her Friday bout against Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova.
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The day before, the boxing world was buzzing after another fighter, Algeria’s Imane Khelif, won her fight in just 46 seconds after her opponent admitted defeat and walked off the ring while crying and in pain.
Khelif’s opponent, Angela Carini of Italy, stated after the fight that she had “never been hit so hard in my life.”
The Algerian fighter went viral online as social media users speculated that she was actually a man due to the fighter’s body and facial features as well as the fact that she did not pass last year’s gender test. However, the Olympics committee maintains that both fighters are in fact biological women who were “assigned female at birth.”
At the 2023 Women’s Boxing World Championships, both Lin and Khelif were stripped of their medals by the International Boxing Association (IBA). The two had failed an unspecified gender eligibility test, according to AP News. This typically happens when the test detects elevated levels of testosterone in a female athlete.
Around the time that the two were disqualified, IBA president Umar Kremlev said: “Based on DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to trick their colleagues into posing as women.” Yet, he did not specify if he was referring to Khelif, Lin Yu-Ting, or other fighters.
Additionally, Yahoo News reported that: “Yu-Ting and Khelif are not transgender, they were born female, but tests show that their DNA contains the usually male-associated XY chromosomes, rather than usually female-associated XX chromosomes, meaning their testosterone levels are more akin to that of a man’s, who can punch up to 2.6 times harder than a woman.”
The IBA has since not been recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), who allowed Lin and Khelif to compete in the 2024 Olympic games.
“These two athletes were the victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA,” The IOC stated. “The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision which was taken without any proper procedure – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top level competition for many years.”
The IOC has adamantly defended its decision to allow both fighters in the Paris Olympic games.
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