It was the full hero’s welcome for Imane Khelif on her return home from Paris to Algiers. An open-topped bus parade on a humid evening that had followed a meeting with president Abdelmadjid Tebboune in the El Mouradia Palace where she was granted the honorary title of major in the Algerian army.
The celebrations were only a little more muted on the other side of the world, where Lin Yu-ting, lauded as the “daughter of Taiwan” by its president, was the honoured guest at a sumptuous banquet put on by her sponsors Yumark Enterprises.
The two athletes had emerged from the Olympic Games as stars at home despite an international furore over their gold medal-winning performances; Khelif in the women’s 66kg boxing event and Lin in the women’s 57kg.
The trigger for the outcry had been their disqualification from the previous year’s world championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA) after it said they had failed “gender tests”. The Y chromosome had been identified in two blood samples. Both women had been registered as female at birth but they had not met the female category eligibility criteria.
There was much noise and little clarity but differences of sex development (DSD) describes a group of conditions that occur early in pregnancy in which sex development is not typical. Some people with DSDs are raised as female but have XY sex chromosomes and blood testosterone levels in the male range.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC), at odds with the IBA over the organisation’s Russian funding and governance failures, refused to recognise the IBA’s conclusions and so, bearing passports as evidence of their female gender and a long history of fighting as such, the two boxers fought at the Games – and won.
“I’ve never been hit so hard in my life,” said Italy’s Angela Carini after abandoning her first round bout against the 25-year-old Khelif. The coach of Lin’s defeated quarter-final opponent, Svetlana Staneva, told reporters: “When the test shows that he or she has the Y chromosome she should not be here.”
For many gold medal-winning boxers, the Olympics can be the start of something special; the story of Khelif and Lin’s diverging post-medal careers perhaps tells a more sobering tale about the potentially lucrative global appetite for sensation as well as the confusion in the chaotically administered sport of boxing when it comes to the issues of biological sex and gender.
Khelif, the eldest of six children, from an impoverished family of shepherds in Biban Mesbah, a village in central Algeria, is said by friends to be outgoing and friendly, albeit a little chaotic. She is “shy, funny and a little naive, who liked to get into mischief and kept her little-girl heart,” said Roumaysa Boualam, a fellow boxer on the Algerian Olympic team. She also appears to have an eye for the finer things in life.
One of Khelif’s first public appearances after Paris was to take her place on the front row next to the actor Julianne Moore at Milan Fashion Week. A fashion shoot followed with Vogue Arabia which declared Khelif as embodying a “new era of beauty”. She featured on the magazine’s front cover in a black Loewe jumpsuit. Negotiations are said to be underway with a major streaming platform, believed to be Netflix, to chronicle her rise to fame in a documentary series. There is money to be made and she is making it – but what about the boxing?
There had been talk of Khelif challenging her IBA disqualification in order for her to continue her amateur career. In an article for Legal Week in August, lawyer Libby Payne, at the legal firm Withers, said she had been working with Khelif since March last year on the case. “I would describe the decision to exclude someone without having a policy in place as being very open to challenge,” she said.
Chris Roberts, the chief executive at the IBA, said he had no knowledge of any such legal challenge. “This is nonsense, I haven’t heard anything from either of these two people [Khelif and Lin],” he said. “We did what we did, we told the IOC what had happened. We informed that we understood they were not eligible and they [the IOC] continued to allow them. If there is nothing to hide, have a public test. There is no requirement to tell lies. It is what it is. There is no legal challenge to us directly. And if they feel unjustly done by, let’s go down that route. It would be brilliant. No problem at all.”
A spokesman for Withers said: “I’m afraid that we’re not currently in a position to discuss Imane’s situation.”
John Dennen, a former editor at Boxing News, said Khelif, who has a trainer in the US who works with both amateurs and professionals, had instead set her hopes on becoming a professional in a jurisdiction where the summer row might not be an impediment.
“I think she is on course to turn professional or working out how or where to turn professional,” he said. “In America [the rules on gender eligibility] is all done state by state, you can have different rulings based on different state athletic commissions. And the thing with boxing is that a lot of bodies come up with rules that suit them. You can always find somewhere to box and someone to box if you really want to.”
It is not the route that Lin, 29, has evidently decided to take, letting it be known that she hoped for further Olympic glory in Los Angeles in 2028. She eschewed the attention of the media, offering few insights in her thinking about the extraordinary events of the summer when Donald Trump was among those criticising her presence. She instead took up the role as an assistant professor at Chinese Culture University’s Department of Physical Education to teach “boxing” and “sports skill training”. She was said to be planning to read for a doctorate.
In the closest thing to a personal statement on the furore over the summer, Lin accepted the role of “anti-bullying” ambassador in local schools. But the education department of the Republic of China (Taiwan) did not respond to questions about the role in a possible sign of a lack of appetite for highlighting the bullying claims now that Trump is returning to the White House. More significantly for Lin’s aspirations and the sport as a whole, her first attempt to get back into boxing ended in the sort of confusion that will offer little assurance that boxing has a grip on this difficult issue.
Following the break between the IOC and the IBA, a rival boxing federation emerged to sanction amateur fights that is angling to win support from national bodies to organise bouts at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics.
The new body, named World Boxing, organised a World Boxing Cup in Sheffield for the end of November. Lin had flown over to the UK to fight for the first time in public since her Olympic final. Then shortly before the event, the Taiwan Sports Authority issued a statement to its media: she was out.
“She is female, meets all eligibility criteria, and successfully participated in the women’s boxing event [in Paris], winning a gold medal,” it said. “Unfortunately, as World Boxing is newly established and still navigating the development of its operational mechanisms, it lacks the clear regulatory policies of the IOC that ensure the protection of athletes’ rights. Additionally, World Boxing’s medical committee has yet to establish robust confidentiality procedures to safeguard the medical information submitted by Taiwan regarding Lin Yu-ting.”
The fighter had offered to undergo a “comprehensive medical examination locally” but World Boxing had declined and the Taiwanese had “decided to withdraw from this event proactively” to avoid further “harm”. It was a baffling development for officials at World Boxing who insisted that Lin had been eligible to fight. “World Boxing’s current eligibility policy does not prevent Lin Yu-ting from taking part in the World Boxing Cup,” a spokesman said. “Selection decisions are made by national federations and the boxer was not entered in the event.”
What had spooked the Taiwanese? Had Lin realised the inevitability of fresh controversy in Sheffield? Neither side were able to give an explanation. But the events have raised fresh doubts over Lin’s ability to come back in the ring, as has World Boxing’s announcement that they will establish a working group to reexamine its gender eligibility rules which is expected to report back in the early new year.
“At World Boxing, we put boxers first and the safety of athletes is absolutely paramount,” a spokesman said. The announcement inevitably also raises doubts that Khelif will be able to compete in the organisation’s world championships in Liverpool in September, as the Algerian had suggested she would before turning pro.
As the golden year of 2024 closes for Khelif and Lin, there must remain then some doubt over whether either boxers will fight again – or at least in what arena. But, to the loud consternation of many, they will always have those memories of coming home.
