2024 Olympic women’s boxing: Algeria and Taiwan threaten legal action against the IBA if it discloses Khelif and Lin's medical information
The committees of the two countries sent letters to the International Boxing Association to dissuade them from disclosing the biological sexes recorded in the medical tests carried out in 2023 for the World Boxing Championships in New Dehli.
Lin Yu-Ting and Imane Khelif.
A day before the women's boxing final at the 2024 Paris Olympics, tension is growing between the Olympic committees of Algeria and Taiwan and the International Boxing Association (IBA), which refused to use the same standards as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and stands by its decision not to consider boxers Imane Khelif and Yun-Ting Lin as eligible to compete with women.
Specifically, this Thursday, IBA official Gabriele Martelli published the letters that the legal teams of the Taiwanese and Algerian delegations sent to the IBA between last Sunday and Monday. In these letters, the lawyers of both Olympic committees threatened the IBA with legal action if it discloses the medical information of the two athletes.
Khelif and Lin are immersed in one of the biggest controversies of this edition of the Olympic Games after they were accused of not being biological women, despite being able to compete in the women's categories under IOC rules.
The issue gained notoriety after Khelif fought Italy's Angela Carini in the women's middleweight category. The Italian quit after 45 seconds of fighting, in frustration. Since then, media and public attention have focused on these two cases.
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The Taiwanese and Algerian Olympic committees' threats come in the wake of an IBA press conference held in Paris last Monday. At that conference, IBA officials again assured that after medically examining both boxers, neither of them met their criteria to compete as women. It was reiterated that, in the IBA's opinion, it was necessary to have XX chromosomes to be considered a woman.
Despite repeating this information again, they did not comment further on the biological characteristics of the two female fighters. In 2023, the president of the IBA, Umar Kremlev, did state that the athletes who were disqualified from the women's competition in New Dehli had XY chromosomes. Khelif and Lin were not allowed to compete in that tournament.
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