It was a telephone call to Dr Emma Hilton, the developmental biologist whose work illuminates why sex matters in sport, that gave a first inkling as to the freight train hurtling down the tracks. Given her research had illustrated the average man could punch 162 per cent harder than a woman, I had wanted to establish what, to put it bluntly, the International Olympic Committee was playing at by allowing two biologically male boxers into the female category. “They are trying to balance fairness, inclusion and safety,” she said. “But safety isn’t about balance. Safety is a cut-off. If it’s not safe, nobody cares if it’s fair or inclusive. You can’t do it.”
The very notion of these fighters competing in Paris as women seemed indefensible. Not least when footage from 2022 surfaced of one of them, Algeria’s Imane Khelif, hitting a Mexican opponent so hard that the beaten Brianda Tamara reflected: “I don’t think I had ever felt like that in my 13 years as a boxer, nor in my sparring with men.” Surely the IOC would intervene before the first scheduled bouts for Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting? Surely it was unconscionable to permit boxers deemed ineligible for last year’s world championship due to tests revealing XY chromosomes, the male pattern, into combat with women?
Dr Hilton’s warning of the danger came on Monday, July 29. But far from heeding it, the IOC did nothing. Almost two weeks on, its inertia and flat denial of science has enabled both Khelif and Lin to sweep to Olympic titles, each achieved with four lopsided victories. Mired in politics and blinded by ideology, it has presided over the perfect storm of a scandal. “They are women”: this, all along, was president Thomas Bach’s incantation about Khelif and Lin, which is what they consider themselves to be. And yet he still cannot even present a persuasive definition of what a woman is.
To Bach and his IOC acolytes, in hock to a belief that your sex is whatever you say it is, womanhood can be determined by passport status. Except athletes do not compete at the Olympics using legal documents or self-declared gender identities. They compete using their bodies, with their capabilities governed by the immutable laws of human biology. And so when the International Boxing Association wrote to the IOC 14 months ago, disclosing that Lin and Khelif were XY, the arbiters of global sport were duty-bound to investigate immediately, to demand test results of their own.
