Yu Ting Lin of Team Chinese Taipei celebrates her victory against Julia Szeremeta of Team Poland (not pictured) after the Boxing Women's 57kg Final match on day fifteen of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 at Roland Garros on August 10, 2024 in Paris, France.Richard Pelham/Getty Images
Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting has won the gold medal in the 57kg women’s boxing weight class, defeating Poland’s Julia Szeremeta in a unanimous decision.
Lin, 28, joins Algeria’s Imane Khelif in winning her weight class, and both have overcome relentless questions about whether they are men and should be competing against women.
Khelif won gold on Friday in the 66 kg division.
Lin fell to her knees after her fight on Saturday and shook her fist in the air. Then she carried her coach on her shoulders.
Both Lin, 28, and Khelif, 25, breezed through the boxing tournament in Paris and won all their bouts by unanimous decisions, except for Khelif’s first fight when her opponent Angela Carini of Italy withdrew because she said the Algerian hit too hard. The Italian later apologized for her comments.
Lin has not generated the same publicity as Khelif in Paris, but both have been at the centre of a furor over their gender.
The issue first surfaced last year at the world championships when the International Boxing Association disqualified both fighters over allegations blood tests showed they had XY chromosomes. However, the IBA has not disclosed the test results and the association’s credibility has been thrown into question after a bizarre news conference on Monday that was full of inconsistencies.
Nevertheless, the mere suggestion of a gender issue has caused a firestorm on social media and both boxers have faced humiliating comments about their sex. During Lin’s quarter-final bout her opponent, Bulgaria’s Svetlana Kamenova Staneva, wrote a sign which said, in English: “I only want to play with women. I am XX.”
Other opponents have been more supportive. China’s Yang Liu held up Khalid’s arm after their gold medal bout and Szeremeta embraced Lin on Saturday.
Khelif was defiant on Friday and lashed out critics by saying; “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.”
She added that winning gold “gives my success a special taste because of these attacks.”
French lawyer Nabil Boudi has filed a complaint of “aggravated online harassment” with Paris prosecutors on behalf of Khelif. “The investigation will determine who was behind this misogynist, racist and sexist campaign,” Boudi said in a statement released after Khalif’s fight.
Lin has been less vocal, and she has ignored social media throughout the Games. On Saturday, she said she wasn’t sure if she would follow Khalid’s lead and file a claim for harassment.
But she did want to thank those who backed her. “I feel incredible. I want to thank everyone who has supported me and thanks to my team and everyone in Taiwan,” she said after the fight.
During the bout, she said she’d thought about how far she had come, and al the adversity she had overcome. “There are times of great pain there are times of great joy,” she said. “And I cried because I was so touched.”
She’s received strong support from people in Taiwan, including the country’s president. Pan Men-an, secretary-general for Taiwan’s Presidential office, said on Facebook that Lin had been “subjected to humiliation, insults and verbal bullying just because of your appearance and a controversial verdict in the past.”
Lin has been boxing for nearly ten years without any issues about her gender until now.
The IBA first tested Lin and Khelif at the 2022 world championships. Those tests were inconclusive, the association said, and they were retested at the 2023 championships. They were disqualified in the middle of the tournament after the IBA said the follow-up testing allegedly showed both had XY chromosomes.
The IOC doesn’t recognize the IBA because of concerns about corruption and more than 20 national federations, including Boxing Canada, have pulled out of the association. As a result, the IOC has run the boxing tournaments at the Games in Tokyo and Paris.
However, IOC president Thomas Bach has said that unless the IBA is replaced as the sport’s governing body, boxing will not be included in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
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