Algerian boxer Imane Khelif won her bout on Saturday and will be guaranteed a place on the podium just hours after International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach defended her decision to allow her and her fellow boxer. Lin Yu-Ting to compete, saying concerns about their gender identity are “totally unacceptable”.
During her match on Saturday against Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori, Khelif appeared to have a large cheering section chanting her name, “Imane, Imane, Imane!” and waving Algerian flags.
With Khelif’s latest victory, she is guaranteed at least a bronze medal.
Bach strongly defended the inclusion of the two women in the Olympics and called the pushback “hate speech”.
“We have two boxers who were born as women, who grew up as women, who have a passport as a woman and have fought for many years as women,” Bach said in a media briefing Saturday.
Questions about Yu-ting and Khelif’s gender identity emerged after it was revealed they had been disqualified from competing with women at a world event last year but were cleared by the IOC to compete in the women’s 66kg and women’s 57kg events at the Paris games.
The debate was further fueled on Thursday after Angela Italy’s Carini stopped 46 seconds into her match with Helif, resulting in an automatic victory for the Algerian boxer. Carini stopped the fight after only exchanging a few punches and refused to shake Helif’s hand. Carini, 25, fell to the floor crying.
Bach said there was “never any doubt” that Yu-ting and Khelif are women. Both boxers have always competed in women’s divisions, and there is no indication that they identify as transgender or intersex, the latter of which refers to people born with gender characteristics that do not strictly fit the male-female gender binary.
“What we’re seeing now is that some people want to own the definition of who a woman is,” Bach said, adding: “All this hate speech, aggression and abuse … is completely unacceptable.”
In a boxing event last year, female athletes failed gender eligibility tests at the International Boxing Association’s Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi. They were both banned after sports officials said they failed an unspecified test because they allegedly had male chromosomes.
The IAB, chaired by Russia’s Umar Kremlin and an ally of President Vladimir Putin, claimed the fighters failed unspecified suitability tests. The decision came shortly after Helif defeated previously undefeated Russian boxer Azalia Amineva.
Khelif, 25, who was making her debut at the Tokyo Olympics, said her exclusion was a “conspiracy”.
Her father, Amar Khelif, said the attacks on the athlete were “immoral”.
“It’s not fair,” he told Reuters recently.
He said his daughter has always loved sports since she was a child and played soccer. Amar Khelif insisted that she was born a woman.
“She has made us proud many times, honored our country and our flag many times and always made us happy with her results,” he said. “These critics aim to destabilize her so that she fails in the wrestling ring, but she is a champion and will remain a champion.”
Carini said after Thursday’s loss that she finished the match because of a “severe pain” in her nose. He said he was not qualified to make decisions about whether Khelif should be allowed to compete.
Others, including “Harry Potter” author JK Rowling, who has often come under fire for her anti-trans comments, were quick to criticize the fight and the IOC’s decision.
“A young female boxer just had everything she worked and trained for taken away because you allowed a man into the ring with her,” Rowling said. He wrotereposting a video of an IOC official talking about the commission’s mental health and protection initiatives.
“You are a disgrace, your ‘protection’ is a joke and #Paris24 will forever be marred by the brutal injustice done to Carini,” Rowling added.
Former President Donald Trump wrote on his social media site, Truth Social: “I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!”
Others came to Khalif’s defense and celebrated her victory.
“I strongly condemn the baseless attacks against our athlete, Imane Khelif, by some foreign media,” Abderrahmane Hammad, Algeria’s Minister of Youth and Sports, He wrote in X.
She accused questions about her gender identity as “cowardly attempts to tarnish her reputation”.
Ismaël Bennacer, a soccer player for the Algerian national team, wrote that he fully supports Khelif.
“Her presence at the Olympics is just a result of her talent and hard work,” he said he said in X.
The National Black Justice Collective, a civil rights organization that aims to protect black LGBTQ people, said it stands in solidarity with Khelif.
“Simply put, Imane Khelif and the other athletes targeted met the criteria to compete in the Olympics. They deserve to compete as much as any other athlete who trained, prepared and qualified for the most important opportunity in their sport. A chance now blunted by internet trolls and evangelical zealots who are consumed with ignorance and contempt for how weaponized hatred can threaten one’s livelihood and life,” the organization said in a statement.
Non-binary American runner Nikki Hiltz has spoken out about transphobia at the Olympics.
“Anti-trans rhetoric is anti-woman,” she wrote in an Instagram post on Friday. “These people don’t ‘protect women’s sport’, they enforce strict gender norms and anyone who doesn’t fit perfectly into those norms is targeted and vilified.”
Khelif’s next match is on Saturday against Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori. Yu-ting, 28, beat Sitora Turdibekova of Uzbekistan on Friday and will face Svetlana Kamenova Staneva of Bulgaria on Sunday.
