Controversial Olympic boxing champ Imane Khelif skips event after mandatory sex testing introduced

Article content

Olympic champion Imane Khelif is skipping the Eindhoven Box Cup in the Netherlands less than a week after World Boxing announced mandatory sex testing for all athletes.

The Algerian boxer, who won gold at the Paris Games last summer amid scrutiny over her eligibility, did not register in time for the event before applications closed on Thursday.

“The decision of Imane’s exclusion is not ours. We regret it,” tournament media director Dirk Renders told The Associated Press.

Khelif had intended to return to international competition at the tournament in Hotel Eindhoven before World Boxing announced its new sex testing policy last Friday.

Eindhoven mayor Jeroen Dijsselbloem criticized World Boxing’s decision.

“As far as we are concerned, all athletes are welcome in Eindhoven. Excluding athletes based on controversial ‘gender tests’ certainly does not fit in with that,” Dijsselbloem wrote in a letter addressed to the Dutch Boxing Federation and International Boxing Federation. “We are expressing our disapproval of this decision today and are calling on the organization to admit Imane Khelif after all.”

Khelif won a gold medal at the Paris Olympics last summer amid international scrutiny on her and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, another gold medal winner. The previous governing body for Olympic boxing, the Russian-dominated International Boxing Association, had disqualified both fighters from its 2023 world championships after claiming they failed unspecified eligibility tests.

But the IBA was banished for decades of misdeeds and controversy. The IOC ran the past two Olympic boxing tournaments in its place and it applied the sex eligibility rules used in previous Olympics. Khelif and Lin were eligible to compete under those standards.

World Boxing has since been provisionally approved as the boxing organizer at the 2028 Los Angeles Games and has faced pressure from boxers and their federations to create sex eligibility standards.

Its president, Boris van der Vorst, apologized after Khelif was singled out in the governing body’s announcement last week.

Khelif planned to defend her gold medal at the LA Games, but some boxers and their federations have already spoken out against her inclusion.

Earlier this week, a medical report from 2023 was leaked that allegedly shows Khelif biologically is “male.”

The document, which initially was published by 3 Wire Sports, summarizes the findings on the Algerian boxer as “abnormal,” stating: “Chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype.”

A karyotype refers to an individual’s complete set of chromosomes, with Khelif’s having been reported by the International Boxing Association (IBA) as XY, the male pattern.

Alan Abrahamson, an American journalist who first reported last year that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had been warned about Khelif’s now-published medical report, produced the result of a March 2023 test carried out in New Delhi. The results of the test caused the boxer’s disqualification from that year’s boxing championships.

The Algerian was part of a firestorm in Paris over the reported gender test from the 2023 event, but was allowed to compete in the women’s event in Paris and went on to dominate the competition.

The test results reportedly were carried out at Dr Lal PathLabs in New Delhi, which is accredited by the American College of Pathologists and certified by the Swiss-based International Organization for Standardization.

— With files from Dan Bilicki

Check out our sports section for the latest news and analysis.