Sport Secretary Lisa Nandy said she will be speaking to sporting bodies about “inclusion, fairness and safety” after what she described as an “incredibly uncomfortable watch” when asked about an Olympic boxing gender row.
Italian fighter Angela Carini abandoned her bout against Algeria’s Imane Khelif after 46 seconds on Thursday, saying she had “never felt a punch like this”.
Khelif is one of two fighters, along with Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, whose athletes compete in the Olympics as Chinese Taipei, present at this year’s Games, having been disqualified from the World Championships last year by the International Boxing Association (IBA) for failing to meet gender eligibility criteria.
Condemnation following the fight has come from various quarters including Reem Alsalem, who is the UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls (VAWG), some MPs, author JK Rowling and champion boxer Nicola Adams.
Ms Alsalem said Carini had “rightly followed her instincts and prioritised her physical safety, but she and other female athletes should not have been exposed to this physical and psychological violence based on their sex”.
Ms Nandy described the short fight as “an incredibly uncomfortable watch” and 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 told the BBC: “It was an incredibly uncomfortable watch for the 46 seconds that it lasted. And I know that there’s a lot of concern about women competitors, about whether we’re getting the balance right in not just boxing but other sports as well.
“The decision that successive governments have made is that these are complex decisions that should be made by sporting bodies. In this case, for example, I understand that the biological facts are far more complicated than is being presented on social media and in some of the speculation.
“But 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.”
Adams, who won gold for Team GB in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday: “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.
“People not born as biological women, that have been through male puberty, should not be able to compete in women’s sport. Not only is this unfair it’s dangerous!”
Italy’s Angela Carini pictured in floods of tears after the match (John Locher/AP)
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has hit out at the “aggression” against both Khelif and Lin, saying all athletes participating this year “comply with the competition’s eligibility and entry regulations, as well as all applicable medical regulations set by the Paris 2024 Boxing Unit”.
The IOC added: “We have seen in reports misleading information about two female athletes competing at the Olympic Games Paris 2024.
“The two athletes have been competing in international boxing competitions for many years in the women’s category, including the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, International Boxing Association (IBA) World Championships and IBA-sanctioned tournaments.
“The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years.”