Paris Olympics 2024: Organisation stripped of Olympic boxing claims gender-row fighters 'are male'

Imane Khelif (Pic: AFP)

The International Boxing Association (IBA) claimed Monday at a chaotic press conference that tests on two boxers at the centre of a gender controversy at the Paris Olympics 2024 show they "are male".

The IBA said previously that it disqualified Algeria's Imane Khelif and Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting from its 2023 world championships after the fighters failed gender eligibility tests, without specifying what the tests were.

The boxing in the French capital is run by the International Olympic Committee because of financial, governance and ethical concerns at the IBA. The IOC cleared the two boxers to fight and both are in the Paris Olympics 2024 semi-finals and therefore guaranteed a medal. The two organisations have been in open dispute. An IBA press conference in Paris was designed to clarify what tests Khelif and Lin underwent last year, and what the results showed.

IBA officials including Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, the organisation's president, who was on a remote video call, gave a series of contradictory statements to a room packed full of reporters. The officials said they were also constrained by medical confidentiality. What was clear was when Ioannis Filippatos, former chairman of the IBA's medical committee, said "abnormalities" were detected in blood tests in 2022.

Also Read: 'It can destroy people': Olympic boxer Imane Khelif calls for end to bullying after backlash over gender misconceptions

The two boxers were tested again in 2023 to confirm the initial findings, IBA officials said, and after that they were disqualified. "The medical result, blood result, looks -- and the laboratory says -- that these boxers are male," said Filippatos. "The problem is that we have two blood exams with karyotype of male. This is the answer from the laboratory."

A karyotype is an individual's complete set of chromosomes, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute in the United States. IOC president Thomas Bach and high-level officials from Algeria and Taiwan have strenuously defended Khelif and Lin, saying they were born and raised as women, and have passports saying that. The Olympic body, which has effectively expelled the IBA from the Olympic movement, has accused the IBA of making "an arbitrary decision" over disqualifying the duo in 2023. Khelif and Lin also fought at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, but did not win a medal and competed without controversy.

(With agency inputs)