Paris: On Thursday, Italian boxer Angela Carini quit her 66 kg women’s category boxing match against Algeria’s Imane Khalif on Thursday, handing the latter, who was banned from competing in world championships following failures in testosterone and gender eligibility tests, a win in the opening round. Algeria’s Khelif won the fight within just 46 seconds after her opponent quit. A very few punches were thrown before Carini abandoned the match, which is a rare occurrence in Olympic boxing.
The win drew adverse comments from many prominent people like JK Rowling and Elon Musk who took to social media questioning the gender of Khelif.
“Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better? The smirk of a male who knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered,” JK Rowling wrote on X.
Elon Musk responded to a post by Sports celebrity host Riley Gaines who said “Men don’t belong in women’s sports #IStandWithAngelaCarini Let’s get it trending”
Musk replied “Absolutely”.
Many such comments on social media forced the IOC to come out and back Imane Khelif. In its reply, the IOC said “All athletes participating in the boxing tournament of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 comply with the competition’s eligibility and entry regulations, as well as all applicable medical regulations set by the Paris 2024 Boxing Unit (PBU). As with previous Olympic boxing competitions, the gender and age of the athletes are based on their passports.”
“These rules also applied during the qualification period, including the boxing tournaments of the 2023 European Games, Asian Games, Pan American Games and Pacific Games, the ad hoc 2023 African qualifying tournament in Dakar (SEN) and two world qualifying tournaments held in Busto Arsizio (ITA) and Bangkok (THA) in 2024, which involved a total of 1,471 different boxers from 172 National Olympic Committees (NOCs), the Boxing Refugee Team and Individual Neutral Athletes, and featured over 2,000 qualification bouts,” the IOC statement read.
The IOC said that the athletes in question had been subjects of an arbitrary decision by the International Boxing Association earlier.
