Olympics 2024: IBA comes out swinging for IOC: Inside the toxic dispute causing Olympic boxing’s gender row

Imane Khelif is not alone in landing some brutal right hooks in Paris this week. “We will not stand by and allow women’s boxing to be destroyed,” was the battle cry from the International Boxing Association as it came out swinging for the International Olympic Committee. “There will be no athletes with high levels of testosterone competing in women’s boxing championships. We will defend women boxers wherever they compete including the Olympics.”

On the face of it, IBA president Umar Kremlev’s outburst to the Inside the Games website, and anyone else within earshot, only echoed the sentiments of eminent campaigners for fair sport. Studies show higher testosterone carries a huge safety risk for women in any combat sport. Men, the science shows, punch 2.6 times harder than women; the biggest documented performance advantage in any sport. The IOC, therefore, must swallow criticism this week from the likes of Nicola Adams, Judy Murray, JK Rowling and even Donald Trump.

But behind the scenes, as the drama has reached boiling point, the main source of bitterness among senior figures at the IOC is that the IBA was able to steal a march. The IOC and IBA have been in all-out war since at least 2019 when the boxing body was suspended over concerns around its finances, governance, ethics, refereeing and judging.

Imane Khelif competes against Anna Luca Hamori in the women's 66kg quarter-final boxing match. Photo / Getty Images

In an unprecedented move, the IBA was then stripped of its status as the sport’s world governing body in 2023. That decision came four months after the body disqualified Khelif and Lin Yu-ting from the 2023 World Championships.

But in the 46 seconds it took Khelif, having twice failed IBA sex tests, to win her opening round, the boxing body has once again stolen some momentum.

Mark Adams, the IOC’s spokesman, has spoken of concerns about Algerian Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin facing a “witch hunt”, being “stigmatised” and caught up in “culture wars”.

But senior sources within the sport in Britain say the IOC has only itself to blame for hanging the pair out to dry. The failure to settle a long-simmering dispute with the IBA, which for years ran boxing at the Olympics, has cost them dear. Only in Paris and Tokyo has boxing been organised by the IOC rather than the IBA, which is, in part, why the sport is facing an existential threat at LA 2028.

The rift had turned irreversibly toxic long before Paris. Kremlev last year described IOC leadership as “prostitutes in sports who get involved in politics”. Criticism, in turn, of Kremlev is equally unflattering. Critics point to the Moscow-born administrator’s ties to Vladimir Putin and accuse him of spending heavily on apparent self-promotion. He had also been slow to rip up an IBA sponsorship agreement with Russia’s state energy supplier Gazprom after the war in Ukraine.

Yet it is entirely the IOC’s fault that they have given Kremlev an opportunity to suddenly pitch himself as one of the good guys. Sport has known since at least 2016 that a gender crisis – either via the inclusion of Differences in Sex Development (DSD) or trans athletes – at the Olympics was only a matter of time.

There have been redrafting of the rules but in short the IOC has farmed out decision-making powers to individual sports to decide their rules based on “robust and peer-reviewed science… which demonstrates a consistent, unfair and disproportionate competitive advantage and/or an unpreventable risk to the safety of the athletes”.

That has been obviously unworkable in boxing since the IBA divorce so decisions largely rest with the national Olympic committees and federations. Now, as the current crisis reaches justifiably deafening levels, Kremlev, who reportedly signed off the disqualifications last year, sits pretty.

Mike McAtee, USA Boxing’s executive director, is among the IBA’s fiercest critics. He suggested to the Washington Post that Kremlev would ultimately like to see “Olympic-style boxing fail”. Instead it is World Boxing, which McAtee helped to form, which the IOC hopes will one day run Olympic boxing, potentially by as soon as 2028.

Imane Khelif defeated Anna Luca Hamori of Hungary in the women's 66kg quarter-final boxing match during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Photo / Getty Images

With so much at stake, the IOC is now nakedly attempting to undermine the IBA’s gender tests on the two boxers. Last weekend, when Telegraph Sport was among the first outlets to report on the two cases, the two IBA disqualifications were reported openly in footnotes on the Paris 2024 official biographies. By Friday morning, however, those IBA tests had vanished in the two athlete profiles, replaced by a link to the latest lengthy IOC statement.

Mark Adams has also grown increasingly emboldened in moving to undermine the IBA’s gender tests on Lin and Khelif in his daily press conferences.

“We have no knowledge of what the tests were,” he said on Friday. “They were cobbled together, as I understand, overnight. There was a change in the results so we don’t want to go there. I think if you start working on suspicions, then we’re in trouble.”

The likes of Nicola Adams, Murray and Rowling might counter such arguments by quite simply pointing out what they saw on Thursday; Italy’s Angela Carini reduced to tears in just two punches.

Whatever happens over the remainder of the Olympic boxing schedule, the fight over gender is what will be remembered from Paris - and that is a problem for both the sport and the IOC.

Hear it as it happens with live commentary of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 on GOLD SPORT & iHeartRadio, plus comprehensive coverage on Newstalk ZB.