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The Algerian boxer on the coronary heart of a global row over gender eligibility has been topped Olympic champion after profitable her gold-medal bout on Friday night time in Paris.
Imane Khelif, 25, was paraded across the ring on the shoulders of her coach after beating China’s Yang Liu by unanimous choice, in entrance of a full home inside Roland Garros, house of the French Open tennis match.
“I’m very joyful. For eight years, this has been my dream and I’m now the Olympic champion and gold medallist,” Khelif mentioned afterwards.
Khelif’s progress by the ladies’s 66kg competitors in Paris has garnered big worldwide consideration, and drawn the Worldwide Olympic Committee right into a rising controversy round gender eligibility guidelines.
The Algerian, who additionally competed within the Tokyo Video games in 2021, was disqualified from final 12 months’s world championships by the Worldwide Boxing Affiliation, together with Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting. The IBA mentioned it had made its choice after the pair failed to fulfill “gender eligibility” standards following assessments carried out through the match. It has not offered particulars of the assessments or mentioned why they came about.
Guidelines on gender eligibility differ from sport to sport, and are decided by the related governing physique.
Nevertheless, the IBA was stripped of its governing position by the IOC in 2019 due to considerations about its funds, ethics and integrity. The IOC, which assumed oversight of boxing in Paris, has additionally repeatedly questioned the IBA’s ties to Russia’s state-backed vitality large Gazprom.
The IOC gave Khelif and Lin the inexperienced gentle to compete in Paris, saying that the IBA assessments had been “cobbled collectively in a single day” and appeared to observe no established protocol. In response to the IOC, the IBA claimed the 2 boxers confirmed elevated testosterone ranges, whereas the boxing physique mentioned its assessments associated to chromosomes.
Within the opening spherical of the competitors in Paris, Khelif’s opponent Angela Carini of Italy withdrew after lower than a minute, saying she feared for her life.
The match prompted complaints from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and US Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, in addition to condemnation from some commentators, who accused the IOC of failing to guard the integrity of girls’s sport.
The IOC mentioned the row was attributable to “deceptive info”, whereas Algeria’s sports activities ministry blamed “baseless propaganda”.
“The Algerian boxer was born feminine, was registered feminine, lived her life as a feminine, boxed as a feminine, has a feminine passport. This isn’t a transgender case,” Mark Adams, the IOC’s head of communications, mentioned afterwards.
Lin, featherweight world champion in 2018 and 2022, is because of battle within the 57kg gold medal match on Saturday.
Earlier this week, the IBA held a chaotic press convention in Paris, throughout which its Russian president hurled criticism on the IOC, whereas the previous chair of its medical committee — a specialist in IVF therapy — responded angrily to questions from assembled journalists. Adams of the IOC later described the occasion as a “travesty”.
On account of the rift between the IOC and the IBA, boxing is at the moment excluded from the programme for the Los Angeles video games in 2028.
