PARIS − It was her ability to dodge punches from boys that led her to take up boxing.
That’s what 24-year-old Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, ensnared in an Olympics controversy surrounding gender eligibility, said earlier this year in an interview with UNICEF. The United Nations’ agency had just named Khelif one of its national ambassadors, advocates-at-large for the rights of children.
Khelif said that as a teenager she ‘excelled’ at soccer, though boys in the rural village of Tiaret in western Algeria where she grew up teased and threatened her about it.
Soccer was not a sport for girls, they said.
To her father, a welder who worked away from home in the Sahara Desert, neither was boxing. She didn’t tell him when she took the bus each week about six miles away to practice. She did tell her mother, who helped her raise money for the bus fare by selling recycled metal scraps and couscous, the traditional North African dish.
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At the time, Khelif was 16.
Three years later, she placed 17th at the 2018 world championships in India. Then she represented Algeria at the 2019 world championships in Russia, where she placed 33rd.
At the Paris Olympics, Khelif is one of two female boxers cleared to compete − the other is Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting − despite having been disqualified from last year’s women’s world championships for failing gender eligibility tests, according to the International Boxing Association.
The problem, such as it is, is that the IBA is no longer sanctioned to oversee Olympic boxing and the International Olympic Committee has repeatedly said that based on current rules both fighters do qualify.
‘To reiterate, the Algerian boxer was born female, registered female (in her passport) and lived all her life as a female boxer. This is not a transgender case,’ IOC spokesman Mark Adams said Friday in a press conference, expressing some exasperation over media reports that have suggested otherwise.
Still, the controversy gained additional traction Thursday night after an Italian boxer, Angela Carini, abandoned her fight against Khelif after taking a punch to the face inside of a minute into the match. The apparent interpretation, from Carini’s body language and failure to shake her opponent’s hand, was she was upset at Khelif over the eligibility issue.
Carini, 25, apologized on Friday, telling Italian media ‘all this controversy makes me sad,’ adding, ‘I’m sorry for my opponent, too. If the IOC said she can fight, I respect that decision.’
She said she was ‘angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke.’
Lin, the second female boxer at the center of gender eligibility criteria, stepped into the ring Friday. Capitalizing on her length and quickness, the 5-foot-10 Lin beat Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova on points by unanimous decision.
Khelif’s next opponent is Anna Luca Hamori, a 23-year-old Hungarian fighter.
‘I’m not scared,’ she said Friday.
‘I don’t care about the press story and social media. … It will be a bigger victory for me if I win.’
Algeria is a country where opportunities for girls to play sports can be limited by the weight of patriarchal tradition, rather than outright restricted. In the UNICEF interview, conducted in April, Khelif said ‘many parents’ there ‘are not aware of the benefits of sport and how it can improve not only physical fitness but also mental well-being.’