Imane Khelif of Algeria celebrates winning against Liu Yang of China.Peter Cziborra/Reuters
The joy was palpable.
On paper the Olympic record will show that Algeria’s Imane Khelif won the gold medal in the 66 kg weight class on Friday, defeating 32-year-old Yang Liu of China in a unanimous decision.
But this bout was always going to be about more than boxing or the Olympics. Just ask Ms. Khelif, who danced around the ring after dominating her opponent from the opening bell. Or the thousands of people who packed into the Philippe-Chatrier court at Roland Garros stadium waving Algerian flags and cheering their heroine.
Few Olympic athletes have inspired more admiration, scorn and curiosity than Ms. Khelif, 25, and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, 28, who will fight for gold on Saturday in the 57 kg weight class. Ever since they arrived in Paris, they’ve been subjected to a stream of speculation about whether they were men and whether they should be allowed to compete against women.
Critics piled on even though there’s no proof that they have male XY chromosomes. Their chief accuser – the International Boxing Association – has been largely discredited and has refused to release the results of tests they say prove the two are men.
Just the fact that the IBA disqualified both boxers from the 2023 world championships and alleged they’d failed gender tests was enough to cause a social-media firestorm.
On Friday, with her gold medal firmly in place and after her coaches had paraded her around the stadium on their shoulders, Ms. Khelif addressed the critics.
“I’m a woman like any other woman. I was born a woman. I lived a woman. I competed as a woman. There’s no doubt about that,” she said. “There are enemies, enemies of success. This is what I call them. These are the enemies of success.”
And she had a message for those who have attacked her online: “My message to the world, to the whole world, is that they should commit to Olympic principles. They should avoid bullying. They should not bully people.”
Support has been slowly building for both fighters, especially after the IBA held a chaotic news conference on Monday during which the association’s president, Russian businessman Umar Kremlev, went off on tangents about sodomites at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and talked about checking between the boxers’ legs.
“I didn’t care about the Olympics but now I am here especially for her. We had to come out and support her,” said Lisa Belabed who spent €600, or $900, on a pair of tickets to Friday’s gold medal match.
Mohamed Boudjemaa came to the bout draped in an Algerian flag and carrying a giant poster of Ms. Khelif he made from photographs downloaded from Instagram. “We know that she’s a woman,” he said firmly.
IOC President Thomas Bach reiterated his support for the athletes on Friday and he dismissed questions about whether the IOC’s eligibility requirements for female athletes were up to date. Mr. Bach insisted the IOC’s system has been working well since 1999 “and therefore our decision is very clear, women must be allowed to take part in women’s competitions.”
In a swipe at the IBA, he added, “What is not possible is that somebody is saying, ‘No, this is not a woman’, just by looking at somebody or by falling prey to a defamation campaign by a not credible organization with highly political interests.”
Simple determinations about gender have become more complicated with the advancement of science. Some females can have differences in sex development, or DSDs, which means they naturally produce more testosterone and have male characteristics.
It’s no longer the case that XX and XY chromosomes clearly distinguish females and males, Mr. Bach said. “This is scientifically not true any more and therefore these two are women and they have the right to participate in the women’s competition,” he added. “This is a question of justice.”
Since the Games began, Ms. Khelif and her family have been peppered with humiliating questions about her sex. “My child is a girl,” her father Omar Khelif told reporters this week as he displayed photographs of her as a child. “She was raised as a girl. She is a strong girl. I raised her to work and be brave.”
Ms. Khelif spoke on Friday about the challenges she faced taking up boxing in a country like Algeria. “I’m from a very small village, from a very poor family in Algeria. I was raised, I was born and raised in poor neighbourhoods, but my family was always proud of me,” she said.
She quit soccer for boxing as a teenager after watching the 2016 Olympics and then mixing it up with some local boys. The nearest boxing gym was 10 kilometres away in the city of Tiaret and to get there Ms. Khelif sold scrap metal for recycling to pay for bus tickets.
Bringing her father onside also wasn’t easy. “I came from a conservative family. Boxing is not a widely practised sport by women, especially in Algeria. It was difficult,” she told Algerian television ahead of the Olympics.
She caught the attention of Algeria’s national boxing team in 2018. They entered her in the Women’s World Championships in 2018 and 2019, but she lost in the first round both times. Two years later, she fought in the Tokyo Olympics and finished fifth (Ms. Lin placed ninth in Tokyo).
Ms. Khelif took silver at the 2022 World Championships and made it to Paris by winning the African qualifying tournament last year.
It was during the 2022 championships that the IBA says it first had suspicions about Ms. Khelif and three other boxers including Ms. Lin, who won her weight class that year. The IBA says it tested all four, but the results were inconclusive.
The organization waited until the 2023 championships to retest Ms. Khelif and Ms. Lin while the other two boxers were cleared. They were disqualified in the middle of the tournament and only after Ms. Khelif had defeated Russian boxer Azaliia Amineva.
The IOC doesn’t recognize the IBA because of long-standing concerns about corruption. Nearly three dozen national federations, including Boxing Canada, have also pulled out of the IBA. As a result, the IOC has run the boxing tournaments at the Games in Tokyo and Paris, and it allowed Ms. Khelif and Ms. Lin to compete.
Both boxers easily advanced through the early rounds in Paris. Ms. Lin has won all her matches by unanimous decisions and so did Ms. Khelif, except her first bout which ended after 46 seconds when her opponent, Italy’s Angela Carini, withdrew because she said the Algerian punched too hard. Ms. Carini later said she regretted her comments.
Ms. Khelif is the first Algerian to win an Olympic medal in women’s boxing and she became an ambassador for UNICEF earlier this year in the hope of inspiring young Algerians.
But this could be her last Olympics.
The IOC has said that it won’t include boxing in the 2028 Games in Los Angeles if the IBA remains the sport’s governing body. “The IOC will not organize boxing in LA without a reliable partner,” Mr. Bach said Friday. “And if these national federations want their athletes to be able to win Olympic medals, they have to organize themselves in a reliable international federation with good governance and respecting all the requirements the IOC puts on an Olympic international federation.”
A decision is expected next year and depending on the outcome, the IOC could unwittingly achieve what the IBA has been pushing for – keeping Ms. Khelif and Lin out of the Olympics.
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