Fearing for her life, Italian boxer Angela Carini abandoned her Olympic opening bout Thursday against Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who last year failed an unspecified sex eligibility test to compete in the Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi.
After two hard blows, the second to her nose, Carini pulled out of Thursday’s match inside 46 seconds, handing the win in the 66-kg division to Khelif. “It could have been the match of a lifetime but I had to preserve my life as well in that moment,” Carini later told reporters through tears.
“I am heartbroken.”
The incident has ignited a fresh firestorm around fairness and safety in women’s sport.
Here’s what to know about the boxing controversy that erupted at the Arena Paris Nord on Thursday:
Who is Imane Khelif?
Khelif is an amateur boxer who represented Algeria at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
In March 2023, Khelif, 25, and another boxer, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, were disqualified from the Women’s World Boxing Championships by the International Boxing Association based on two tests conducted on both athletes — one during competition in New Delhi, the other performed during the IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships in Istanbul in 2022.
The athletes didn’t undergo testosterone testing, and the specifics of the test they did undergo remain confidential, the IBA said in a statement released Thursday. However, “the recognized test conclusively indicated that both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.”
The International Olympic Committee last year stripped the IBA of its status as boxing’s governing body over governance issues and allegations of corruption and, in doing so, took over boxing for the Paris Games, as it did for the Tokyo Games.
The IOC said this week that both Khelif and Yin met gender eligibility criteria to compete in Paris. Lin, a two-time world champion who was stripped of a bronze medal at least year’s world’s championships after failing the gender test, is scheduled to fight in Paris on Friday.
In 2021, the IOC adopted a “framework for inclusion and non-discrimination” in Olympic sport that insists there should be no “presumption of disproportionate competitive advantage” due to sex variations or transgender status.
Some people are born with differences in sexual development, or DSD, where chromosomes don’t fully correspond with the external genitals. For example, some people are born with one X and one Y chromosome in each cell, a condition known as 46, XY that results in much higher levels of testosterone compared to most female athletes.
Women typically have XX chromosome pairs, and men, XY pairs
In guidelines issued ahead of the Paris games, the IOC urged media to avoid terms like “biological male,” “born male” or “born female” because these phrases “can be dehumanizing and inaccurate when used to describe transgender sportspeople and athletes with sex variations. A person’s sex category is not assigned based on genetics alone,” the “Portrayal Guidelines” read, “and aspects of a person’s biology can be altered when they pursue gender-affirming medical care.”
Last fall, Quebec amateur boxer Katia Bissonnette withdrew from a national boxing championship match after learning, an hour before stepping into the ring, that her opponent was a transgender woman.
Bissonnette pulled out, fearing her safety.
What happened in the Arena Paris Nord?
Carini, 25, called an end to the round against Kehlif after taking a blow to the chin inside 30 seconds, according to reports. After the punch to the face, she went back to her corner to have her coach fix her headgear then resumed fighting briefly before returning to the corner and telling a trainer to end the fight.
After the referee raised Khelif’s arm, Carini pulled her hand out of the referee’s grasp and walked back to her corner. She didn’t shake Khelif’s hand and fell to her knees in the ring in tears.
“I have never been hit so hard in my life,” she told reporters.
“I wasn’t able to finish the match. I felt a strong pain to my nose,” she told BBC Sport. She worried she had let down both her nation and her father. “But I stopped for myself, because it could have been a match of my lifetime, but I had to preserve my life as well in that moment,” she said.
“I didn’t have fear, I don’t fear the ring. I don’t fear taking the blows. But this time there’s an end for everything, and I put an end to this match because I wasn’t able to (continue).”
Khelif told BBC Sport: “I’m here for the gold — I fight everybody.”
What happens now?
The controversy has reignited what has become one of the most divisive issues in sport, particularly, though not exclusively, combat sports. Research suggests males are more anatomically specialized in the muscular and skeletal traits that propel a punch forward, delivering blows, on average, twice as powerful as women at roughly equal levels of fitness.
After Thursday’s brief bout, Italy’s prime minister called for banning athletes with “male genetic characteristics” from women’s competitions.
“It was a match that did not seem on equal footing,” Giorgia Meloni told reporters.
“Today, the IOC reaps the humiliating harvest of repeatedly undermining safety and fairness for women and girls in sports,” said former Canadian track champion Linda Blade, past president of Athletics Alberta, the provincial governing body for track and field.
“It’s time for the IOC to restart a full consultation on sports eligibility that, this time, includes the voices of women.”
National Post