Lisa Nandy, the UK culture secretary, has described the Olympic boxing bout between Imane Khelif of Algeria and the Italian Angela Carini as “an incredibly uncomfortable watch” , as a row about the inclusion of two boxers who failed gender eligibility tests at the 2023 world championships continued.
Carini abandoned her bout against Khelif after 46 seconds on Thursday saying she “preferred to stop for my health” and adding “I have never felt a punch like this”.
Nandy acknowledged concern about “getting the balance right” in boxing and other sports when it comes to female competitors. But she said the “biological facts are far more complicated than is being presented on social media and in some of the speculation”.
She said: “I think as sporting bodies try to get that balance between inclusion, fairness and safety, there is a role for government to make sure that they’ve got the guidance and the framework and the support to make those decisions correctly and it’s something that I’ll be talking to sporting bodies about over the coming weeks and months.”
Khelif and Lin Yu‑ting of Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) were disqualified from the 2023 women’s world championships with the International Boxing Association president, Umar Kremlev, saying DNA tests had “proved they had XY chromosomes and were thus excluded”. Lin is due to face Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova in a featherweight bout in Paris on Friday.
On Friday the International Olympic Committee indicated that it will not return to a regime of sex testing athletes, which some have called for in the wake of the bout.
IOC spokesperson Mark Adams said the IBA’s decision had been taken “arbitrarily” and said that Khelif “was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female and has a female passport”. He added: “There has been some confusion that somehow it’s a man fighting a woman. This is just not the case scientifically.”
The IBA is not running the Olympic boxing competition after it was expelled from the Olympic movement for failing to reform judging and refereeing, financial stability and governance issues. It has confirmed it is happy for both fighters to compete under the less strict gender eligibility rules that were in place for the Tokyo Games in 2021.
Adams cast doubt on the testing carried out by the IBA. “We don’t know if the test was accurate. We don’t know whether we should believe the test,” he said, adding that there was “a difference between the test taking place and whether we accept the accuracy or even the protocol of the test”.
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Addressing the issue of sex testing, Adams said “it’s impossible to have a sex test that is comprehensive and works and it’s not discriminatory.” He added: “I don’t think anyone wants to see a return to some of the scenes. I know some of those athletes who underwent sex tests in their teens. It was pretty disgraceful. And luckily, that is behind us.”
Nicola Adams, who won gold for Team GB in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, criticised the IOC’s decision on X, writing that “it was hard to watch another fighter be forced to give up on her Olympic dreams.”