Olympics face potential legal dispute over boxing gender crisis as star calls for disqualification

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The boxing gender crisis intensified last night with the International Olympic Committee facing a potential legal challenge to disqualify controversial fighter Imane Khelif.
As Britain’s finest ever fighter Nicola Adams hit out at Algerian Khelif’s participation at the Olympics, the Hungarian Boxing Association said it is investigating a legal challenge over Khelif’s eligibility to fight women at the Games.
The extraordinary situation will erupt again when Khelif returns to the ring against Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori. Hamori has been mocking her opponent, saying she “cannot wait” and posting an image on Instagram portraying her opponent as a beast with horns
As a second boxer who twice failed sex tests won her opening bout yesterday, the increasingly embattled IOC faces a potential legal dispute. The Hungarian association is sending letters of protest to the IOC and Hungary’s Olympic committee, said Lajos Berkó, a member of the association’s executive board. 
“I am very sad that there is a scandal and that we have to talk about a topic that is not compatible with sport,” Berkó told the nation’s news agency. “This is unacceptable and outrageous.”
Meanwhile, Adams, the British double Olympic champion, is also part of a growing chorus of pressure on the IOC to take action after Khelif defeated her first opponent Angela Carini in 46 seconds. 
“After years of fighting for women’s boxing to even exist in the Olympics and then all the training they go through to get there, it was hard to watch another fighter be forced to give up on her Olympic dreams,” Adams posted on social media.
Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, who have both progressed to the quarter-finals of their respective weights, both twice failed International Boxing Association eligibility tests to compete as women in 2022 and 2023. Those tests, however, are not recognised by the Olympics, who instead accept national Olympic body approval so long as their passports correspond.
On Friday, the day after Khelif wiped out her opening opponent, Lin outpointed Sitora Turdibekova in a featherweight contest and then refused to stop for questions from the media, despite pleas from the IOC. There was no handshake between the pair after a unanimous decision win which sets up a last-eight clash against Bulgarian Svetlana Staneva, who beat Ireland’s Michaela Walsh.
The fight took place after UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls (VAWG), MPs, author JK Rowling and politicians had already turned on the IOC.
Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, also acknowledged the bout on Thursday was “incredibly uncomfortable” viewing. Giving the UK Government’s view for the first time on Friday, Nandy said she will be speaking to sporting bodies about “inclusion, fairness and safety”. She described the short fight as “an incredibly uncomfortable watch” and cited concern about “getting the balance right” in boxing and other sports. But she said the “biological facts are far more complicated than is being presented on social media and in some of the speculation”.
Those comments appear to be a reference to Khelif and Lin being accused of being men by critics online. Meanwhile, as the IOC scrambled to contain the damage, spokesman Mark Adams told Donald Trump and other politicians to “take the culture war out” of the debate.
Trump had promised to “keep men out of women’s sports” as worldwide outrage grew while  Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, also said: “I have been trying to explain for years that, when taken to the extreme, some theses risk impacting women’s rights.”
When asked about politicians such as Trump weighing in, Adams, speaking at the Games’ daily press conference, said: “It is difficult and particularly on this thorny issue that judges say is part of the whole kind of cultural war discussion. For us here, what I would urge is to try to take the culture war out of it and actually address the issues and think about the people and the individuals concerned and the real damage being done by misinformation.”
Later on Friday, Carini, who initially feared she had broken her nose against the Algerian, apologised for not shaking her opponent’s hand in an apparent softening of relations. “All this controversy makes me sad,” Carini told Gazzetta dello Sport. “I’m sorry for my opponent, too. … If the IOC said she can fight, I respect that decision.”
Looking back at the end of the bout today, after the decision was announced Turdibekova made an effort to shake both of Yu-Ting’s coaches, but avoided Yu-Ting, who, unlike Khelif, made no attempt to console her opponent. Turdibekova was tearful as she left the arena
A reminder on why the IOC are subject to Oliver’s criticism: amidst ongoing riffs between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Boxing Association (IBA) that might see boxing excluded from LA 2028, the IOC are in charge of this year’s boxing event, and believe allow athletes to compete per the gender on their passport. Many individual sports federations, like the IBA or World Athletics, now base their eligibility on whether athletes can pass a gender test, that examines their chromosomes and by virtue their testosterone levels.
Both imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting have failed these tests, so are disqualified from the IBA – neither have appealed this – but are eligible for the IOC’s criteria
Lin Yu-Ting will face Hungary’s Scetlana Staneva at 10am on Sunday. The latter also passed through via unanimous decision, beating Ireland’s Michaela Walsh. It will be interesting to see how Staneva reacts to this news compared to Khelif’s next opponent. Our man on the ground, Oliver Brown, believes Staneva and Anna Luca Hamori are being “sent unforgivably into harm’s way by gutless IOC cowards”.
Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan, whose DNA sex test revealed the presence of XY chromosomes, beats Sitora Turdibekova easily on points. The Uzbek walks off without shaking hands pic.twitter.com/ctvDkLnT8X
Yu-Ting will learn who her next opponent is at the conclusion of this fight between Ireland’s Michaela Walsh and Bulgaria’s Svetlana Staneva. Neither have commented on the controversy, but Imane Khelif’s next opponent, Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori, is embracing the challenge.
She shared the following on her Instagram story today…
Unanimous decision and Yu-Ting takes the victory, only having one judge score a round against her in the first. No embrace between the two fighters afterwards before yu-Ting thanks the crowd and makes her way out with no audible disapproval. She’ll fight again on Sunday at 10am
Yu-Ting, safe with the knowledge that she’s up on the score cards, bounces around the ring knowing Turdibekova needs to make the move. The round ends and Yu-Ting celebrates mildly – nothing from Turdibekova
And that all but wins the fight for Yu-Ting, she won that round unanimously. 
An uneventful second round, Turdibekova warming into it a bit more and getting closer to her taller opponent Yu-Ting
Judges score first round 4-1 in Yu-Ting’s favour
Round 1 of three ends, no dramas so far, also very few clean punches landed. Yu-Ting is 5cm taller and her reach advantage is telling defensively, but she’s yet to make an attacking statement
…and we’re underway. Yu-Ting in red, Turdibekova in blue. A good Uzbekistan contingent in the crowd
Lin Yu-Ting is number one seed for this featherweight competition. She walks out and there is no audible booing from the crowd. Sitora Turdibekova qualified on a technicality, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Marcelat Sakobi booted out for a doping whereabouts violation
Yu-Ting’s fight is imminent – here’s what happened, as it happened, yesterday. 
To North Paris Arena, and Day Two of a molten Olympic scandal. After Imane Khelif’s 46-second victory over Italy’s Angela Carini stoked outrage among everybody from JK Rowling to the United Nations, Lin Yu-Ting, the Taiwanese featherweight and the second boxer at these Games thrown out of last year’s world championships due to a failed sex test, fights Sitora Turdibekova of Uzbekistan. 
The Paris Olympics is still reeling from this controversy, with the International Olympic Committee struggling to explain how it allowed Carini to go into the ring against an Algerian whose DNA tests had, according to the International Boxing Committee, revealed XY chromosomes. 
It is doubtful the drama will quite reach Thursday’s extremes, given Lin has only managed one previous knockout win. This would be quite the moment, all told, for a second.
Yu-Ting, who has failed a sex test and is banned from International Boxing Association (IBA) competition, will fight in five minutes. Her opponent, Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova, hasn’t spoken before the bout, although Khelif’s next opponent, Hungarian boxer Anna Luca Hamori, has told media she is not scared following interviews from Angela Carini’s team post-abandonment that said she was warned not to fight. 
Coverage on the two Olympic channels, Eurosport and BBC, haven’t opened up too much of a possibility for that to happen, however – today’s coverage has only just started, five minutes before Yu-Ting’s fight is scheduled to start. 
That last point from Nicola Adams is crucial. In that Donald Trump article, many of Khelif’s critics leave open the inference that she and Yu-Ting were born male. They were both born female, which is why they are eligible for the Olympics, but their DNA is made up of the more commonly male-associated XY chromosome structure, meaning they have elevated testosterone power and a therefore an increased potential for power. 
We have a full explainer on the intricacies here. 
Khelif’s victory vs Carini yesterday sparked widespread and vitriolic reaction, so anticipation for Yu-Ting’s fight, scheduled for 14.30, has exploded over the last 24 hours.
A number of high profile names have weighed in on the debate, including Donald Trump who said “keep men out of women’s sports”. As a demonstration of how complicated the debate has been, 2012 women’s flyweight gold medalist Nicola Adams has also called for Khelif and Yu-Ting’s disqualification, but also specified her support of Angela Carini has “nothing to do with transgender”
Charlotte Dujardin, the Seine pollution, Chinese swimmers… the Paris 2024 Olympics has had its fair share of controversy, but perhaps none more so than that of female boxers Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan and Imane Khelif of Algeria and their failed gender tests.
The IOC decision to allow the two to compete, despite their expulsion from the International Boxing Association (IBA), was contentious before the Games, but Khelif’s victory yesterday via abandonment against Italy’s Angela Carini within 46 seconds – the latter withdrawing saying she had “preserve her life” having “never been hit so hard” – took the scandal to a whole new, vitriolic dimension.
The next episode in this saga is Yu-Ting’s bout today, as she fights Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova in the women’s 57kg featherweight round of 16 with the world watching where in previous circumstances a fight like this may have flown under the radar.
Yu-Ting was banned from IBA boxing, alongside Khelif, in March 2023 having failed a gender test, and had her World Championship bronze medal that she’d won that month stripped. Yu-Ting and Khelif are not transgender, they were born female, but tests show that their DNA contains the usually male-associated XY chromosomes, rather than usually female-associated XX chromosomes, meaning their testosterone levels are more akin to that of a man’s, who can punch up to 2.6 times harder than a woman. Neither have contested these tests.
This is considered grounds for disqualification by the IBA, and for World Athletics who have outcast Caster Semenya for the same reason, but crucially not by the IOC, who sanction that because Yu-Ting and Khelif’s passports say they’re female, they’re free to fight, regardless of the danger that poses to their opponent.  
The Yu-Ting fight goes ahead. Before her expulsion, she possessed a pretty impressive record of 19-5, including two gold and one bronze World Championship medals that have not been reverted, and is the No 1 seed for the women’s featherweight category, a ranking that ensured a bye through the round of 32. Her opponent, Turdibekova, qualified for Paris in lieu of Indian fighter Parveen Hooda’s doping test violation, and beat the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Marcelat Sakobi in the first round by split decision.