The International Boxing Association (IBA) held a press conference Monday to defend itself for its ban of two controversial boxers from claims that its decisions were illegitimate leveled by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
In 2023, the IBA President Umar Kremlev explained his organization’s decision to disqualify Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting and Algeria’s Imane Khelif from competing in the IBA’s 2023 Women’s 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.
However, despite the 2023 disqualification and the stated testing results, the IOC ignored the IBA’s findings and allowed Khelif and Lin to fight in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris this year.
To excuse its own decision to include the two controversial boxers, the IOC has called the IBA’s testing “illegitimate” and said that the tests “lack credibility.”
The IOC has also opposed the IBA on other matters, and last year, it stripped the latter of its title as the world governing body for boxing over finances and governance issues.
The IBA, though, is defending itself in Monday’s presser and laid out the facts that both Lin and Khelif submitted to the gender tests during the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships.
The organization says the tests were conducted by an independent lab in Istanbul, and both boxers failed the chromosome test requirements to be categorized as women.
The group added that both boxers were informed of the test results in writing and were given the opportunity to appeal the decisions.
Lin did not appeal. Khelif, though, did file an appeal but soon withdrew the filing and closed the case.
Dr. Ioannis Filippatos, the former Chair of the IBA Medical Committee and an OB/GYN with three decades of experience, offered expert testimony.
“Medicine is knowledge, it is not opinion … One passport can give to us the opportunity to be men, and, tomorrow when I go back to Athens, I can go to my government and change my name from Ioannis to Ionnia. That means I am a woman tomorrow? Please. The nature and the biological world do not change.”
When aggressively challenged by belligerent media in attendance, Dr. Filippatos spoke plainly about the gender test results for Khelif and Yu-ting.
“The medical result — the blood result — looks and say, the laboratories, that this boxer is male.”
Khelif has secured at least a bronze medal in the Olympics and will be on the path to gold if victorious against Janjaem Suwannapheng of Thailand on Tuesday. Both Khelif and Yu-ting are guaranteed medals after multiple comprehensive victories over female opponents.
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