Well, it’s only Monday and we already have the least surprising news you’ll hear all week: Now that the Olympics are over, it turns out that, despite her protestations, Algerian women’s boxer Imane Khelif does have male chromosomes and her coaches knew it.
In an interview published Friday with French outlet Le Point, Georges Cazorla, a French-based coach who helped create a regimen for Khelif’s training, all but confirmed that she had tested positive for a rare intersex condition called Disorders of Sexual Difference — a disorder that can give a female boxer a biological advantage and potentially raise issues of safety in the ring.
While the article was published Friday, it only began to really hit in the English language press Sunday U.S. time.
🚨BREAKING: Dr. Georges Cazorla, who played a crucial role in developing a rigorous training program to prepare Khelif for the Paris Olympics, confirms claims that Khelif has XY chromosomes and high testosterone.
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— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) August 11, 2024
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As Reuters said in a helpful explainer it published just as the Olympics began and the controversy over Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting — who were both disqualified from the International Boxing Association’s world championships last year for failing a chromosomal test — began percolating, “Women’s sports categories exist in most sports in recognition of the clear advantage that going through male puberty gives an athlete.
“That advantage is not just through higher testosterone levels but also in muscle mass, skeletal advantage and faster twitch muscle,” Reuters’ article read. “In combat sports such as boxing, this can be a serious safety issue.”
Thankfully, nobody seems to have been seriously injured by Khelif. However, in arguably the least shocking result of the Olympics, both she and Lin won gold in their respective weight classes.
In his interview with Le Point, Cazorla — a biology teacher who specialized in in physical activity and sports at the University of Bordeaux — talked about a biological marker test designed for Khelif in which 19 parameters were used to determine an ideal regimen for her.
Did you watch Olympic boxing?
However, it was his description of the IBA’s disqualification and the tests he ran that got the most press.
“I discovered this by following the world championships by video in March 2023. She is disqualified for the final against a Chinese woman. At the time, I assumed these were diplomatic, international squabbles … But the decision was based on testing,” he confirmed.
And yet, he said he “found it disgusting.”
“Regardless of the results of these biological tests and, without going into their details – it’s a matter for biologists and doctors, this poor young girl was catastrophic, devastated to discover at once that she might not be a girl!” he said.
“All the people who appreciated her, including me, intervened to cheer her up. The prospect of the Olympic Games made it possible to restructure everything. Fortunately, she can also rely on her family (very modest, whom she helps with boxing), based in a small town in Algeria,” Cazorla added.
As it turns out, Khelif does have “a rather particular morphotype,” or bodily structure.
And where did she get that from? It’s not particularly hard to deduce.
“After the 2023 world championships, where she was disqualified, I took the lead by contacting a renowned endocrinologist from the Paris University Hospital, Kremlin-Bicêtre, who examined her,” Cazorola said.
“He confirmed that Imane is indeed a woman, despite her karyotype [person’s complete set of chromsomes] and her testosterone level. He said: ‘There’s a problem with his hormones, with his chromosomes, but she’s a woman.’ That’s all we cared about.”
Clearly. For Cazorla and those around Khelif, it wasn’t about the fact that she might injure someone, perhaps permanently. It wasn’t about the fact that her first opponent dropped out after two punches because she said she’d never been hit that hard. It was the fact that she’d been given such horrible news, and now people were treating her so terribly! For, um, something that very clearly gives a woman an unfair advantage in the squared circle.
“For Imane, she was born a girl. She was raised as a girl. She has a girl’s sensibility,” he said. “On this account, why should we not test everyone who has superior abilities to others?
“For example to French basketball player Victor Wembanyama, immense, in terms of his growth hormones? It’s stupid.”
(Wembanyama is the 20-year-old, 7-foot-4 franchise cornerstone of the San Antonio Spurs.)
This is a curious argument inasmuch as 1) there’s no clear-cut chromosomal test that would indicate an abnormality so fundamental as a Y chromosome in a male basketball player’s karyotype, and 2) he does not play in a sport where the externalities of allowing someone with such a fundamental condition to compete in the name of wokeness can lead to grave injury.
Both of these things apply to Khelif. Neither are supposed to be important.
And, yes, in case you were wondering, it turns out that Khelif did receive treatments to reduce her natural testosterone to levels the Olympics find acceptable, at least according to Cazarola.
If this were said in a straightforward way at the outset of the Olympics, of course, would there have been so many defenses of Khelif? Most of these defenses seemed to hinge, at least in part, on some level of plausible deniability — that the tests were murky or the governing body that conducted them was crooked.
Lo and behold, what Khelif’s detractors claimed all along was the case was, in fact, the case: Khelif had an innate advantage due to a rare condition that put her through male puberty (and all the advantages that brings to a boxer) and, only after her failed test in 2023, was the natural testosterone levels her body produces brought down to within an acceptable range.
That’s a problem that should have been insuperable, in other words.
This didn’t break until the final days of the Olympics, however, when the matter was already settled within the ring and the International Olympic Committee had effectively told female boxers with XX chromosomes who compete against Khelif and Lin to shut up and suffer whatever increased potential for traumatic brain injury they might face in the name of social justice.
If you find less surprising news this coming week, it’ll be a miracle.
