The Olympic Games has failed heinously in its duty of care to its athletes. The scandal that has unfolded in the boxing ring has reaped a damage upon two of its competitors that cannot be measured.
There were two boxers who suffered in the ring at the Paris North Arena. One was Italy’s Angela Carini, who was placed in extreme danger. The other was Algeria’s Imane Khelif, whose biological sex is now the subject for open discussion on the biggest stage in the sporting world.
One has been in genuine physical danger. The other has been laid open to a kind of global humiliation. It is insane that this has been allowed to happen.
It is not as though this boxing scandal hadn’t been flagged up to the IOC, yet the governing body ignored all the red flags and allowed these two competitors to share a ring. The IOC has failed utterly in its responsibility to look after them.
The IOC “seeks to promote a safe and welcoming environment for everyone involved in elite-level competition”. That is a quote from a governance document it released 2½ years ago. It has not stood by these intentions.
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The IOC also seeks to provide fair competition. Fair competition becomes obviously flawed with doping scandals that are, mostly, out of its control. However, in this case, which the IOC does control, it appears that it has actually promoted the unfairness of the contest. It has seen this coming and failed to take appropriate action. That it involves a boxing contest, in which the athletes’ physical safety is paramount, is why it is particularly appalling.
• Women’s bout involving failed gender test fighter ends in 46 seconds
Khelif had already failed a gender eligibility test at the World Championships in Delhi last year. Another boxer, Lin Yu‑ting, of Chinese Taipei, who is due to fight on Friday, also failed a gender eligibility test. Both were disqualified from those World Championships. The IOC has banned the IBA, the boxing authority that ran that event, because it has lost its credibility as a governing body. However, it is inexcusable that the IOC would then overlook the findings of these gender eligibility tests.
This terrible oversight led to the farce in the ring on Thursday for two athletes whose competitive lives have been dedicated to performing at the Paris Games. Carini is now out of a competition in which it seems she never had a chance. Khelif is being held up as the villain of the piece, but is simultaneously having her gender being picked over by the world’s media.
How can the IOC have been so unutterably foolish? The answer, it seems, lies in its obsession with inclusivity, which is, of course, a right and admirable concept. However, it had attempted to be inclusive towards a number of Russian athletes, for instance, who have been invited here to compete as neutrals, but it soon transpired that two thirds of those Russians had violated the eligibility rules by expressing support for the invasion of Ukraine or by having links to the military.
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In other words, good intentions, poor process, negative outcome. That is exactly what we have seen here with the boxing, except that the stakes are so much higher.
In retrospect we could argue that Khelif should have withdrawn from the Olympics after her disqualification from Delhi. However, huge decisions such as these should not be left to the young, ambitious athletes, especially in this situation when Khelif will never have wanted to accept the judgment handed down in Delhi.
It is the governing body — in this case the IOC — that should be doing exactly that: governing. Sometimes hard decisions are hard when you are promoting inclusivity. This one should have been easy.
The boxing scandal will now dominate the next few days of these Olympics, and so it should unless the IOC takes immediate action. In a statement released on Thursday evening the governing body said it had no intention of taking any quick action. However, the immediate priority has to be to remove Khelif and Yu‑ting from the Olympic competition. That is harsh on the pair of them but it is nevertheless the only course of action. The outcome of the 46 seconds that Khelif required to launch two punches into Carina’s face made that abundantly clear.
This course of action would also make a statement about the fairness of the competition that the IOC likes to promote. If you believe in fair competition — fair sport for biological females in this case — then you have to put hard decisions before lofty ideals. In the process it would also be showing a greater duty of care to athletes, like Khelif, whose gender eligibility has been found to stand against them.
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I recall being there in person when the Caster Semenya situation became public at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin in 2009. On the one hand, there were the best female middle-distance runners in the world being denied the right to fair competition because it would be later confirmed that they had been competing against a DSD (difference in sex development) athlete. On the other, you had Semenya herself, a teenager whose gender was suddenly global headline news. Truly heartbreaking. Everyone loses here.
Here it is happening again. The difference on this occasion, of course, is that you are throwing in physical danger too.
It is madness that the IOC has allowed this problem to arise. It needs to act immediately to prevent the damage to sport, the Games and its competitors from escalating any further.
