IBA CEO Chris Roberts has responded to IOC president Thomas Bach, insisting that his Russian-backed body never accused Imane Khelif of being a transgender athlete.
The gender row emerged in 2023, back when the International Boxing Association banned female fighters Khelif and Lin Yu-ting from competing at their World Championships.
This was because, according to IBA, both boxers had returned positive results for XY chromosomes following their gender eligibility tests.
With IBA having lost its Olympic recognition due to a lack of financial transparency, though, the boxing body’s findings carried little weight in the eyes of the International Olympic Committee.
The IOC, therefore, subsequently cleared Khelif and Yu-ting to compete at Paris 2024, with both boxers going on to claim gold in their respective divisions.
In response, IBA have since filed a lawsuit against the IOC, citing Donald Trump’s executive order preventing transgender athletes from competing in female sports.
And while there have been no further developments on the situation, Khelif immediately threatened to take legal action after the damning complaint was made against her last month.
Meanwhile, IOC president Bach, whose successor will be elected on March 20, has doubled down on his stance against IBA.
“These two women boxers [Khelif and Yu-ting] have been born as women, they have been raised as women, they have competed as women and nobody ever claimed even that they are transgender,” Bach told Associated Press.
“What happened there was a Russian-led misinformation campaign [from IBA] which then distorted the truth, the facts, and now we have this unfortunate situation that these two athletes are considered to be transgender. But. They. Are. Not.”
Bach’s words came after the IOC granted provisional recognition to World Boxing, allowing the breakaway body to organise Olympic boxing for Los Angeles 2028.
But with IBA continuing to organise major amateur boxing competitions, including this year’s women’s World Championships, it appears that the gender row is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
In fact, CEO Roberts has made it clear that Khelif and Yu-ting were considered to be male athletes – not transgender – in the eyes of his boxing body.
“We’ve never said anything about transgender,” Roberts told Boxing News. “We talk about [gender] eligibility through the testing process, but we’ve never said that Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting are transgender.
“[The IOC] didn’t listen to what we had to say. We explicitly wrote to them on a couple of occasions and, once the tests were in, we explained to them the situation.
“There’s clearly an agenda there. At the end of the day, we follow our rules and criteria. All females have got to be eligible – XX chromosomes.”
Both random and targeted gender testing will take place throughout this year’s World Championships, with the competition’s preliminary bouts commencing today in Niš, Serbia.
