The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is lashing out at critics of two fighters who failed the International Boxing Association’s (IBA) gender test in 2023, calling the questioning of their right to compete as females, “aggression.”

At the time, IBA President Umar Kremlev explained the IBA’s decision to disqualify these boxers from the 2023 World Boxing Championships, according to Russia’s Tass News Agency.  “Based on DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to trick their colleagues into posing as women. According to the results of the tests, it was proved that they have XY chromosomes. Such athletes were excluded from competition,” Kremlev said.

Aggression was certainly on display Thursday, as Algeria’s Imane Khelif, one of two fighters who failed the IBA’s gender test in 2023, hit Italian female fighter Angela Carini so hard that she quit the match in less than a minute.

Carini collapsed to the canvas in tears before exiting the ring and telling reporters that she had “never taken a punch like that; it’s impossible to continue.”

Still, despite that display of Khelif’s obvious disproportionate power compared to an Olympic-caliber female athlete, the IOC blasted the IBA’s decision to disqualify the Algerian and doubled down on its defense of Khelif’s right to compete at the Paris Games.

“We have seen in reports misleading information about two female athletes competing at the Olympic Games Paris 2024,” read the joint statement from the Paris Boxing Unit and the IOC. “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 committee blamed the IBA’s decision to disqualify Khelif and Taiwanese fighter Lin Yu-Ting on flawed testing policies.

These two athletes were the victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA. Towards the end of the IBA World Championships in 2023, they were suddenly disqualified without any due process.

According to the IBA minutes available on their website, this decision was initially taken solely by the IBA Secretary General and CEO. The IBA Board only ratified it afterwards and only subsequently requested that a procedure to follow in similar cases in the future be established and reflected in the IBA Regulations. The minutes also say that the IBA should ‘establish a clear procedure on gender testing.’

The committee then took aim at the “aggression” mounted against the two fighters.

“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.

“Such an approach is contrary to good governance.”

While it is true that much of the criticism against Khelif and Yu-Ting—before Khelif’s Thursday fight with Carini—was based on concerns over the 2023 disqualification, the far greater outrage that has taken place since that bout is based on Khelif punching a female Olympic athlete so hard that she withdrew from her lifelong quest for Olympic gold after only 46 seconds.

Khelif is set to fight Hungarian Anna Luca Hamori on Saturday.