Questions of Gender Amid Russia-West Tensions in the World of Boxing

As viewers and competitors celebrate medal triumphs, personal bests, and Olympic records, the 2024 Paris Olympics hasn’t been without its controversies, including one involving just two of the more than 11,000 athletes participating.
Boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting have been caught in an ongoing dispute between Russia and the West for control of the sport, with issues over their gender and eligibility raised as part of this conflict.
In 2019, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suspended the International Boxing Association (IBA) in an attempt to force it to change its operations due to concerns about financial mismanagement and leadership issues.
When that didn’t happen, it voted 69-1 (with 10 abstentions) to cease recognising the IBA as amateur boxing’s governing body.
The disqualification meant Amineva’s unbeaten status remained intact.
The IBA said Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin hadn’t met “the necessary eligibility criteria” and were found to have “competitive advantages over other female competitors” after failing to meet unspecified eligibility tests. Both boxers competed in IBA tournaments for years before their abrupt disqualification.
Despite having no recognised standing in the sport—and certainly not at an Olympic level—the IBA highlighted the issue when both boxers competed in Paris this year.
Additionally, it announced it would offer prize money totalling US$3.1 million to medal winners at the Paris Games, despite the fact that most national boxing federations are no longer members.
It also offered to give $50,000 to Angela Carini, the Italian fighter who quit her bout with Kehlif, along with $25,000 each to her coach and Italy’s national boxing federation, which has refused what it calls the “hypothetical offer.”
Any attempt to have the IBA explain the nature of its eligibility tests has been met with obfuscation.
“We don’t know what the protocol was, we don’t know whether the test was accurate, we don’t know whether we should believe the test,” its spokesperson Mark Adams said.
In the meantime, Olympic boxing is being managed directly by an administration within the IOC, which has decided to opt out of setting gender eligibility rules for any sport after undertaking a two-year review of the subject.
Instead, it has given decision-making authority to the governing bodies of each sport. As a result, swimming, athletics and cycling all moved to develop their own gender policies.
Broadly, they forbid anyone who has been through male puberty from competing as a woman at an international level.
With no replacement for the IBA yet recognised, boxers need only conform to the IOC’s broad statement of principle.
It states that “no athlete should be precluded from competing or excluded from competition on the exclusive ground of an unverified, alleged or perceived unfair competitive advantage due to their sex variations, physical appearance and/or transgender status.”
In 2016—the last Olympics in which the IBA had official status—Irish fighter Michael Conlan accused it of corruption after losing a decision to a Russian.
The IBA suspended all referees and judges involved in the Olympic tournament and admitted some decisions were “not at the level expected,” but the results stood.
Former President Ching-kuo Wu had run the IBA for 11 years before being provisionally suspended in October 2017, then issued with a life ban—along with former Executive Director Ho Kim—after a report documented alleged “gross negligence and financial mismanagement of affairs and finances.”
In the chaos, staff were locked out of the organisation’s headquarters. Concerned by the infighting and opaque finances, the IOC stopped payments, worsening the boxing group’s financial crisis.
He was then replaced by an associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Umar Kremlev.
Kremlev came to power and offered to clear the IBA’s $16 million debts if the sport’s Olympic status was retained.
Kremlev has been head of the Russian Boxing Federation since 2017 and has brought Russian state-backed energy giant Gazprom on board as a major sponsor.
An attempt to replace him with Dutch boxing federation president Boris Van Der Vorst in 2022 failed after the challenger was declared ineligible.
Even though the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that Van Der Vorst was wrongly prevented from standing, a proposal to stage a new election was rejected by IBA delegates.
A total of 19 countries, including the UK and United States, boycotted the events after the IBA allowed Russian and Belarusian boxers to compete under their countries’ flags, contravening IOC guidance following the invasion of Ukraine.
That provoked an angry response from Kremlev, who said the countries boycotting the championships were “worse than hyenas and jackals.”
He was also accused by the IOC of using “violent and threatening language” against a number of its officials during the American Boxing Confederation Continental Forum in Brasilia that year.
In response, the IOC said the derogatory language against the IOC organisation and its employees by IBA leadership was “simply unacceptable.”
“Furthermore, calling for an individual formerly linked to the IOC to be ’shot’ is a language that has no place in sport or in any normal civilised debate,” the statement added.
Roughly three dozen federations have left the IBA in the past two years to form World Boxing, a new governing body hoping to replace the IBA in the next Olympic cycle.