Good evening and welcome to live coverage of the women’s featherweight final bout from the 2024 Paris Olympics, featuring the No 1 seed Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan and Julia Szeremeta who is Poland’s first boxing finalist for 44 years. Lin, a double world champion at bantamweight and featherweight, was, as you know lest you have been sleeping under a rock, disqualified by the International Boxing Association and stripped of her bronze medal at last year’s championships after failing what the discredited former sanctioning body called an unspecified but “separate and recognised test, whereby the specifics remain confidential”, which, it says, showed the presence of XY chromosomes.
Imane Khelif, who won gold on Friday night, was similarly barred but their eligibility was approved by the IOC which disputes the reliability of the tests and whether they were undertaken judiciously and credibly.
It’s been a mess from the start and the two boxers have been unfairly vilified for what are purported to be biological differences, as yet unproven, victims of the war between the IBA and the International Olympic Committee. At a chaotic press conference staged by the former governing body in Paris last week, the IBA failed to provide any concrete evidence of the testing process or results.
“This is not a question of inclusion. This is a question of justice,” the IOC president Thomas Bach said on Friday. “This is not as easy as some in this cultural war may now want to portray it. If somebody is presenting us a scientifically solid system how to identify men and women, we are the first ones to do it. We do not like this uncertainty.
“What is not possible is someone saying ‘this is not a woman’ just by looking at somebody or by falling prey to a defamation campaign by a not credible organisation with highly political interests.”
“This has no impact on our very clear position,” Bach said. “Women have the right to participate in women’s competitions. And the two are women.”