IOC, USA Boxing punch back against ‘culture war’ engulfing sport

SEINE-SAINT DENIS, France — The media seating at the North Paris Arena overflowed Friday afternoon as Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu Ting walked into the ring for her first fight of an Olympic boxing tournament that has crashed into mayhem.

Lin, 28, is one of two women boxers here who were disqualified from last year’s world championships over a disputed “gender test,” which was administered by a rival federation that has been shunned by the IOC and other boxing organizations. When the other disqualified fighter, Algeria’s Imane Khelif, won her bout on Thursday, she sparked an outcry among politicians and anti-transgender activists, many of whom falsely claimed that Khelif, 25, and Lin are transgender women.

The outcry was still deafening, at least on social media and in the media, as Lin entered the ring. All anyone had come to the arena see, it seemed, was whether she would deliver a powerful enough punch in her 57 kg fight to stop Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova the way Khelif did Thursday - when her 66 kg opponent, Angela Carini, quit less than a minute in after being hit in the face.

Lin’s fight wasn’t so easy. She won by unanimous decision a sloppy bout that went all three rounds, with neither she nor Turdibekova landing many significant blows. When Lin was declared the winner, cheers and a handful of boos rang through the arena. She left the ring and sped through the interview area without stopping to speak with reporters.

Later in the afternoon, Mike McAtee, USA Boxing’s executive director, stood outside the arena, shaking his head in anger.

McAtee, who’s been running USA Boxing for three Olympics, said he has been familiar with Lin and Khelif for years. He said there have never been allegations of the women having higher-than-average levels of testosterone that might give them an inherent physical advantage over other female fighters. He pointed to Khelif’s nine career defeats and the fact that only five of her 37 victories over seven years have come by knockout.

Instead, McAtee said, the controversy was likely the result of a long-simmering dispute between the International Boxing Association, which for years ran boxing at the Olympics, and the IOC, which took control of Olympic boxing starting with the 2021 Tokyo Games, alleging corruption and mismanagement at IBA.

IBA’s president, Umar Kremlev, a Russian sports power broker, oversaw the disqualifications of the two women, according to McAtee and people with knowledge of the decision. And USA Boxing officials expected Kremlev to attempt to disrupt the Paris Olympics, McAtee said, given that the IOC had banned Russia and the IBA from these Games. McAtee pointed to social media posts early in the Games from Kremlev that led to reporters asking questions about the two boxers, stoking emotions even before Khelif’s fight on Thursday.

The IBA did not respond to a message seeking comment.

“We have to follow all the rules,” McAtee said. “However, our concern is that there are people out there that are motivated to see the Paris Boxing Unit” - that’s the name for the IOC agency running the boxing tournament - “and Olympic-style boxing fail.”

“And there’s only one person with that motivation,” he added.

McAtee has been one of the most vocal of several amateur boxing leaders who led a split from the IBA, and who have helped to form World Boxing, which the IOC hopes will one day run Olympic boxing. That could come as soon as the 2028 Los Angeles Games, where the sport is currently not on the program because of the lack of a recognized, independent governing body.

IOC officials mostly skirted questions about that the dispute with Kremlev. But in an unusually pointed news conference here Friday, IOC spokesman Mark Adams questioned the validity of the tests the IBA administered to Lin and Khelif.

“We have no knowledge of what the tests were,” Adams said. “They were cobbled together, as I understand, overnight to change the results [of the world championships.”

Three people with knowledge of the situation have said that the IBA’s sudden disqualifications of Lin and Khelif came just days after Khelif beat Russia’s Azalia Amineva. The loss was the only one of Amineva’s career, and Khelif’s mid-tournament disqualification has allowed Amineva to be 21-0 through this spring, according to the website BoxRec.

“Why were they just disqualified, why weren’t they suspended?” McAtee asked. “If this was such an issue, why wasn’t this raised when they fought in the Olympic qualifiers? Why did it only come up once they got here?”

Inside the arena during Lin’s fight, more than 50 reporters looked for hints that the online firestorm was also flickering in the arena. When a Taiwan coach went through the media zone, speaking briefly in Chinese to a few Taiwanese journalists, reporters crowded around as the tape was played and a reporter who spoke Chinese tried to translate.

Though the boxing continued, many of the reporters left. They’ll be back soon, though: Khelif fights Hungary’s Anna Hamori in a quarterfinal Saturday - in a bout that Hungary’s boxing federation, which has not joined World Boxing, said it planned to protest in letters to the IOC.

Lin next fights Bulgaria’s Svetlana Staneva in a quarterfinal Sunday.