PARIS (AP) — Olympic Games organizers said Sunday that the random tests carried out on boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, which sparked a storm of vitriol over the women being wrongly identified as transgender or male, were “so flawed that it is impossible to oppose them.”
International Olympic Committee spokesman Mark Adams again strongly defended Algeria's Khelif and Taiwan's Lin, criticizing the sport's now-banned governing body, the International Boxing Association, which claimed the fighters had failed unspecified fitness tests for women's competition.
The two athletes were “taken away and tested” at the 2023 World Boxing Championships because “there were suspicions against them,” said Adams, who criticized the process that singled them out.
“I hardly need to say that if we act on suspicions against any athlete, we are on a very bad path,” he said.
He rejected the test completely.
“There are a whole bunch of reasons why we're not going to cover this,” Adams said. “Partly confidentiality. Partly medical issues. Partly that there was no basis for the test in the first place. And part of it is that sharing data about this is also very much against the rules, international rules.”
“The entire process is flawed,” Adams added. “From the genesis of the test, to how the test was shared with us, to how the tests became public, it’s so flawed that it’s impossible to deal with.”
Lin and Khelif are at the center of a conflict over gender identity and rules in the sport, as critics raised their disqualification last year after the IBA claimed they did not “meet the required eligibility criteria and that they had a competitive advantage over other female competitors.”
The Russian-dominated sports federation was given the unprecedented punishment of a permanent ban from the Olympic Games last year and has not hosted an Olympic boxing tournament since the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.
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AP Olympic Games: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games
