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This attempt to clarify boxing’s gender row was a shambles. It also told us everything
Within Paris’s Salon Des Miroirs, a suitably chosen venue for a sport much in need of self-reflection, a Greek gynaecologist and obstetrician who in his spare time runs the European Boxing Federation stepped forward to explain the difference between a man and a woman.
As Dr Ioannis Filippatos reasoned, after performing hundreds of surgeries and delivering countless babies during a 30-year medical career, “I know who is woman and men.”
There is no doubt the doctor knows his way around female anatomy. Gesturing towards the lower midriff of one sports journalist who wanted to know why women’s boxing found itself at the centre of the most damaging scandal at these Olympic Games, Dr Filippatos said matter-of-factly, “I don’t need an ultrasound to know you have a uterus.”
If this seems a strange thing for a boxing official to say to a journalist at a press conference, you have no idea.
To describe as a shambles Monday’s attempt by the International Boxing Association to present its case that two women boxers, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, shouldn’t be competing in Paris, doesn’t capture the epic folly that unfolded on Monday over three inglorious hours, while browbeaten boxing officials sat at a desk, a Russian overlord appeared above them on a massive Zoom screen and a motley crush of journalists became an angry mob.
By the time it started, everyone had been waiting for an hour and a half inside a long, stifling-hot hall of fading glory, peeling paint and tarnished mirror panels. The 19th century salon used to serve as a ballroom, but these days serves up doof-doof music for Paris 20-somethings on Saturday nights.
The Russian overlord was IBA president Umar Kremlev, a self-styled businessman and boxing promoter who claims he is on a mission from God – the heavenly one rather than Putin – to protect his deeply held Christian beliefs and the sanctity of women’s sport.
With a framed painting of the Virgin Mary hung above one shoulder, Jesus above the other and a pair of old boxing gloves draped on a wooden stand, he launched into a meandering sermon about the outrageous depiction of the last supper in the Paris’ opening ceremony, his mistrust of IOC president Thomas Bach, the need for IOC governance reform and why, despite chairing an organisation stripped of its Olympic status due to long-standing corruption concerns, was standing up for freedom, democracy, honesty and transparency.
That was the gist of it, at least. Any chance the IBA president had of presenting a cogent argument was plagued by technical gremlins, with Kremlev goldfishing the first few minutes of his speech until sound was established. His harried translator, who struggled to keep up with his free-flowing chain of thought, was sacked and replaced by another before Kremlev finished his opening remarks.
The straight man in all this was Chris Roberts, a career British soldier turned sports administrator who was last year appointed IBA secretary general and chief executive with a mandate to address financial issues and corruption allegations that have long plagued the sport.
Imane Khelif.Credit: Getty Images
Roberts provided a dispassionate chronology of the circumstances that led to Khelif and Lin being advised in March last year, and again in April this year, that due to the results of repeat blood tests, they were ineligible to box as women. He said the IBA had not intended – and had no desire for – the issue to be raised at the Olympics, where it has no involvement in the boxing competition.
Kremlev reappeared, at various times throughout the conference, to deliver further sermons on why the Olympic movement had become a modern parable of Sodom and Gomorrah – he has previously called Bach “Sodomite-in-chief” – and oscillate between boorish and full-Borat. He saved his most offensive comments for last.
“Genetic testing shows these are men,” he flatly stated, cutting across a more nuanced view offered by the good doctor. “We didn’t verify what they had between their legs. We don’t know whether they are born like that or they have changed something or whatever.”
Kremlev’s intervention was a reminder that, although sports need carefully considered policies to balance inclusion and fairness in women’s sport, the arguments about this are inevitably led by the wrong people and at the wrong time. In this sense, Kremlev finds himself in unlikely alliance with US presidential candidate Donald Trump and author JK Rowling, who likened one of Khelif’s bouts to domestic violence.
Algerian boxer Imane Khelif poses for a photo after an interview.Credit: AP
In the middle of all this, Algerian boxer Roumaysa Boualam, a friend of Khelif, staged a dignified, one-woman protest. She sat quietly, holding an Algerian flag, while journalists and the IBA officials exchanged verbal jabs without anyone landing a blow. Eventually, the press pack crowded around Boualam was as large as the grumble of hacks still listening to Kremlev’s sermon.
Khelif and Lin aren’t men. They were born and raised by their families as girls and have always competed in boxing as women. Dr Filippatos said the blood tests revealed that both athletes had a male karyote; the biological term given to someone’s chromosomal make-up. While this doesn’t make them men, under IBA rules it makes them ineligible for women’s boxing.
Dr Filippatos, who through his professional life is used to dealing with people in distress, did his best to keep the tone of the press conference respectful. His efforts were swamped by a deluge of angry interjections, in multiple languages, all at once.
“Elle est une file, Elle est la femme!” shouted one reporter. “Is not trans. She is born woman,” said another.
“You are talking about blah, blah, blah, blah transformation. There was no transformation!
“She is not man!”
Finally, the doctor abandoned the last of his bedside manner. “Woman! Woman! Why you attack me? Woman! Woman, please!”
It is no way to win an argument, in any language. The IBA needn’t have tried.
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