International Boxing Association (IBA) President Umar Kremlev said Monday that two boxers who were disqualified from a women’s boxing event last year had “very high” levels of testosterone on two separate tests in 2022 and 2023. Both boxers have advanced to the medal round in the Olympics.
The IBA held a news conference on Aug. 5 to clarify the association’s position on disqualifying Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting during the 2023 IBA women’s world championships.
“The testing shows that the testosterone levels in these two [athletes] are very high,” Kremlev said, who joined via video link and spoke through a translator.
“We have tests, results of the tests. Genetic testing shows these are men,” Kremlev said at Monday’s news conference.
“We don’t know whether they were born like that, or if they changed something,” he added.
Testosterone is a hormone responsible for increasing muscle mass, while chromosomes are structures within cells that contain genetic information including a person’s sex.
IBA chief executive Chris Roberts said that the organization has received letters from the Algerian and Taiwanese National Olympic Committees (NOCs) informing the IBA that it cannot disclose “any information pertinent to either boxer.”
“If I was accused of not being a man, I would bring over all the documents, I would go through all checks in order to prove that I am a real man and not a woman,” Kremlev said.
Lin has not mentioned the gender controversy, while Khelif has said it “harms human dignity.”
IOC Calls Tests Illegitimate
At a news conference in Paris on Aug. 4, IOC spokesperson Mark Adams called the IBA’s tests illegitimate.The IOC—which stripped the IBA of its status as the sport’s global governing body over governance and finance concerns—said both athletes are “victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision” and were disqualified without due process.
IOC president Thomas Bach also defended Khelif and Lin at a news conference on Aug. 3, saying there was “never any doubt” about the two athletes being women.
“We have two boxers who were born as a woman, who have been raised as a woman, who have a passport as a woman, and who have competed for many years as a woman, and this is the clear definition of a woman,” he said.
Bach has said that the IBA’s complaints are part of a broader campaign aimed at undermining the Paris Olympics—from which Russia has been excluded due to the war in Ukraine. IBA head Kremlev has been linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The IBA has maintained that it is acting to protect women’s boxing and never intended to bring this matter to a head before last Thursday’s bout between Italy’s Angela Carini and Khelif stirred up controversy.
Dr. Ioannis Filippatos, a surgeon and president of the European Boxing Confederation, said during the IBA’s latest news conference that the IOC’s means of determining a person’s sex based on the information in an athlete’s passport is problematic.
Kremlev later suggested that the IOC should do its own testing, saying, “If somebody has doubts on this, you can refer to the athletes. Ask them for another test.”
Carini has since apologized to Khelif, saying in an interview with local newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport that she did not mean to stir up controversy.
“All this controversy certainly made me sad, and I also felt sorry for my opponent, she had nothing to do with it and like me was only here to fight,” she said.
Relations between the Russian-dominated IBA and the IOC have been strained for years, but soured further after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
In June 2023, the IOC voted to banish the IBA from the Olympics. The IOC is now overseeing the boxing competition in Paris and applying eligibility rules from the previous two Olympics.
