Algerian boxer Imane Khelif advances to gold-medal bout as controversy swirls

Open this photo in gallery: Imane Khelif, left, from Algeria, fights Janjaem Suwannapheng, from Thailand, in the boxing women’s 66kg semifinal during the 2024 Olympic Games, on Aug. 6, in Paris.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail

Imane Khelif looked to the sky and raised her hands in triumph, one more victory and one step closer to an Olympic gold medal that many people around the world believe she doesn’t deserve.

The Algerian boxer easily won her 66-kg semi-final match on Tuesday, defeating Janjaem Suwannapheng, 23, of Thailand in a unanimous decision at a packed Roland Garros stadium. Khelif moves on to the gold-medal bout on Friday, but the controversy swirling around her and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting rages on.

Khelif and Lin have been subjected to a stream of attacks on social media and faced humiliating comments about whether they should have been allowed to compete at the Games as women, even though they’ve been fighting as women for nearly a decade and no evidence has ever been produced to prove they are not females.

None of that mattered to Khelif on Tuesday, or to the many fans who came out to offer their support. The crowd was overwhelmingly on her side and Algerian flags could be seen throughout the Philippe-Chatrier court, which is usually the scene of the French Open tennis tournament. Shouts of “Imane, Imane” rained down throughout the bout.

“It’s a shame to harass someone that is in the Olympics. She doesn’t deserve that. It’s a shadow over the Olympic Games,” said Yamina Abdat, 29, who came to the fight draped in an Algerian flag. “We know her a long time. She has always competed as a girl so why now.”

The claims against Khelif, 25, and Lin, 28, first surfaced last year when the International Boxing Association disqualified both fighters from the world championships after officials said they failed gender testing.

The IBA has insisted that the boxers were tested twice – at the 2022 and 2023 championships. The first tests were inconclusive, according to officials, and the boxers continued to fight at IBA-sanctioned tournaments. The association said the second test proved that the two women have XY chromosomes, which are found in males.

But attempts by IBA officials to back up their allegations during a news conference on Monday only raised more questions about the organization’s conduct.

During the briefing, the IBA’s top officers declined to produce any test results or explain how the tests were administered. Chris Roberts, the association’s secretary general, said the IBA waited a year to conduct the second tests because it had never encountered the issue before. He also said the results could not be made public because of confidentiality concerns raised by the Algerian and Taiwanese boxing organizations.

Roberts also declined to confirm whether the IBA continues to receive financial backing from Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom, which has been a major sponsor of the IBA and has been sanctioned by several western countries, including Canada, because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

During Monday’s news conference, the IBA’s Russian president, Umar Kremlev, appeared by video from Moscow and launched into a flurry of personal attacks against IOC president Thomas Bach, whom he described in vulgar terms. He also went on a tirade about the opening ceremony on July 26, which he described as un-Christian.

After defending the IBA’s testing of the boxers, Kremlev told the briefing, “We didn’t verify what they have between their legs,” before adding, “We don’t know whether they were born like that, or they changed something, or whatever.”

The IBA isn’t recognized by the IOC because of long-standing allegations of corruption. As a result, the IOC has run the Olympic boxing tournaments at the Tokyo Games and in Paris.

Bach has stood by the boxers and condemned the social-media campaign against them. “We have two boxers who are born as a woman, who have been raised as a woman, who have a passport as a woman, and who have competed for many years as a woman, and this is the clear definition of a woman,” he told a news conference last week.

On Tuesday, IOC spokesman Mark Adams said the IBA’s news conference further demonstrated the need for a new governing body for the sport. “If you ever needed any evidence at all that the IBA is unfit to run boxing just look at the key members of the IBA who took part in that travesty,” he said.

Khelif stopped briefly to speak with reporters after the fight. She didn’t address the controversy and said she was “aiming for gold”

That could come Friday.

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