Calculon wrote: ↑Fri Aug 02, 2024 12:45 pm
JM2K6 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 02, 2024 9:01 am
Sandstorm wrote: ↑Fri Aug 02, 2024 8:56 am
You're not wrong here, JM. I watched it later and the Italian bird quit faster than Paula Radcliff when the going got a little warm. Full Italian WWII-surrender mode.
It wasn't a battering at all.
The other fighter looks rather blokey vs the cuter Italian and the media have gone to town as usual.
The fact that she's a non white north African who looks masculine by certain western standards is clearly a big part of it, sadly.
I don't want to believe that Carini did this on purpose. Charitably you could say that maybe she was a mess before the fight and quit because she knew she wasn't in any position to compete against a serious opponent. However, the circumstances of the fight itself, the weird behaviour afterwards, the claims of a broken nose despite looking picture perfect after the fight, and her coach saying people were telling her before the fight not to do it because Khelif is a man and it's dangerous... I can't help but be deeply suspicious of all of this. I hope I'm wrong
come on, she looks masculine by any standard.
I'm pretty sure most "non white" North Africans would think she looks masculine
anyways, fair enough about the IBA, they're clearly dodgy as fuck.
She will probably have to undertake some gender tests after this Olympics to coninue boxing and maybe she will turn out to be 100% legit.
She looks like half the women who compete in combat or contact sports at a decent level.
Anyway, I found this reddit post to be a very clear summation of the facts as I understand them:
In the interest of spreading… actual information, I’m copying my comment from another thread, because this is infuriating.
The short(ish) version is that she's a cis woman who been competing for years against other women, and there was no issue, including at the 2020 Olympics. Never any question of her gender or testosterone levels, no articles, no headlines, no commentary from her opponents, nothing. She doesn't even have a particularly stellar record, though she's been improving in recent years.
She was even tested at the 2022 World Championships and they didn't find any problems. She took the silver medal without incident.
Up until the 2023 World Championships - **when she beat a Russian boxer.**
Quick backstory on the IBA, the boxing organization that tested her and oversees the Boxing World Championships: it's been in contention with the IOC for years for issues of corruption and concerns over refereeing and judging, but things have gotten worse over the past few years. The IOC was concerned about the IBA's complete financial dependence on their sponsor: Russian-owned Gazprom. The IBA also elected a corrupt Russian president in 2020, and in 2022 they (wrongly) declared his re-election opponent ineligible, so he won an uncontested re-election. Multiple countries including the US and UK boycotted the 2023 World Championships because the IBA suspended Ukraine and un-suspended Russia and Belarus in 2022, against IOC guidelines. All of this ultimately resulted in the IOC severing ties with the IBA, which hasn't happened with any sport in decades. They fucked up so bad that the IOC may drop boxing altogether; another organization has risen up and is attempting to replace the IBA in order to save boxing at the Olympics.
Anyway. Imane Khelif competes in the World Championships in 2022, undergoes testing, no eligibility issues, takes the silver medal. She competes in 2023, no eligibility issues. Gets to the Round of 16, beats a Russian boxer...suddenly, she gets tested again and based on the results of that test AND her test from 2022, they declared her ineligible.
The IBA never said what kind of test it was, just that it wasn't a testosterone test, nor did they explain the results, citing privacy. In an interview with Russian state-owned media, the Russian president of the IBA said that they did a DNA test and found that Khelif had XY chromosomes, but again...look at the source, the audience, the track record of corruption, the timing...
Plus, they did this test in 2022 and didn't have any issue with the results? They used the 2022 test as part of their basis for disqualifying her - even though they allowed her to compete in 2023, up until she beat a Russian athlete.
So there's no evidence that she has higher testosterone. She competed in the 2020 Olympics without incident, even when other female athletes with high testosterone were withdrawn. And the IBA didn't administer a testosterone test.
There's also no other information, testing, questions, or anything that she has talked about that would allude to any sort of chromosomal or hormonal difference. She identifies as a woman and always has.
People are diagnosing her with all kinds of conditions but there’s actually no evidence for any of it aside from one vague test that an extremely corrupt organization associated with Russia subjected her to when she beat a Russian athlete, the results of which were only discussed by the Russian president of the corrupt organization when he talked to Russian media.
The sheer scale of the breathless accusations of her being a man, the stating of the existence of testes or her being XY / DSD, going through male puberty etc etc a as hard fact without any actual evidence is genuinely upsetting. I expect this sort of shit from JK Rowling, Logan Paul, and other poison brained idiots, but seeing the guardian's lead sports writer join in (and that prick Ewan McKenna) has actually gotten to me a little bit.
Khalif is a role UNICEF role model for young girls, a good boxer who has fought her entire life as a woman to be able to follow her dreams of being a boxer in a country that has some very regressive views on women.It is inevitable that successful women who look butch - of which there are so, so many in sports - would suffer as a result of the witch hunt whipped up against trans people. Now it doesn't matter if you're trans, you just need to look "wrong" and the right people can kick off an international shitstorm against you, aided and abetted by obsessive scumbags and helped by useful idiots.
The culture war fucking sucks, and there's no sign it's going to get better any time soon.
