The Olympics is poised to celebrate with two women boxers who were accused of being male after the second of the pair won her semi-final tonight and has a chance to strike gold.
Lin Yu-Ting, 28, of Taiwan beat Turkey’s Esra Yildiz, 27, for a place in the womens’ 57kg category final.
She joins Algeria’s Imane Khelif, 25, in Olympic boxing finals after both had to endure a storm of opposition to their involvement in the Paris Olympics.
Yu-Ting’s progress tonight in going all the way to the final has delivered a major rebuff to her critics as well as those of Khelif who have fought their way towards gold amid Paris 2024’s biggest controversies.
Olympic chiefs’ will also feel they have been vindicated in their decision not to ban her and Khelif after the International Boxing Association said they had failed gender eligibility tests during a tournament in India last year.
Tonight she let her boxing do the talking for her and won unanimously against her opponent who stood two inches shorter.
Yu-Ting defied the storm that has followed her into the ring and bowed and saluted the 13,000 crowd at Roland Garros which has been converted from a tennis stadium to a boxing arena and will stage both must-see bouts.
Khelif’s box office appeal has led Olympic chiefs to place her fight with China’s Liu T=Yang as the final bout on Friday night’s bill to allow American and global TV audiences to tune in after a working day.
Lin Yu-Ting, 28, and Khelif. 25, were disqualified from last year’s women’s world championships having both failed key gender tests.
Boxing fan Gilles Johanne, 49, of Paris said: ‘This is fantastic for the Olympics. I am so glad she has won. I don’t care what others say about her. She is an Olympic athlete like all others.
‘My wife and I have been feeling really sorry for this young woman. It must have been really lonely for her this week.’
But Yu-Ting, who stands at 5ft 9in, was registered female at birth, as was Khelif who has a passport as a female.
Olympic chiefs have defended the involvement in Paris 2024 of both Khelif and Yu-Ting who began boxing at the age of 13.
The boxer underwent additional tests by Taiwan’s sports administrators before the Olympics which confirmed her eligibility after last year’s disqualification.
Yu-Ting’s Olympic officials called the accusations discriminatory and declared them a deliberate attempt to undermine the boxer’s mental state.
The IOC said it made its eligibility decisions on boxers based on the gender-related rules that applied at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
Several sports have updated their gender rules over the past three years, including World Aquatics, World Athletics and the International Cycling Union. The track body also last year tightened rules on athletes with differences in sex development.
The IOC is in charge of boxing in Paris because it has revoked the Olympic status of the International Boxing Association following years of governance problems, a lack of financial transparency and many perceived instances of corruption in judging and refereeing.
The IBA is controlled by its president Umar Kremlev, who is Russian. He brought in Russian state-owned Gazprom as its primary sponsor and moved much of the IBA´s operations to Russia.
However Olympic officials say the matter regarding the two boxers is a ‘minefield’ and that no forensic and unquestionable scientific evidence has been provided to prove both athletes were not women.
IOC chief Bach said: ‘We are talking about women’s boxing. We have two boxers who are born as a woman, who were raised as women, who have passport as women, who have competed for many years as women. This is the clear definition of a woman.’
But the IBA genetic tests showed that Khelif and Yu-Ting have male XY chromosomes in their DNA, but neither are transgender.
Celebrities such as JK Rowling, British Olympian swimmer Sharron Davies and double Olympic gold medal-winning ex-boxer Nicola Adams have spoken out against their involvement in women’s sport.
Today JK Rowling doubled down on her opposition to the boxers who have failed the gender tests.
She wrote on X: ‘Commentators pretending critics of the IOC’s reliance on documents rather than sex testing think Khelif is trans are straw-manning. I don’t claim Khelif is trans. My objection, and that of many others, is to male violence against women becoming an Olympic sport.’
Davies said: ‘This is shocking. The IOC are a bloody disgrace. In effect legalising beating up females. This must stop!!! What the hell’s the matter with them?’
Former Prime Minister Liz Truss asked: ‘When will this madness stop? Men cannot become women. Why is the British Government not objecting to this?’
But Olympics chiefs have slammed what they described as an online ‘hate’ campaign against the boxers.
Khelif’s quarter-final opponent Anna Luca Hamori of Hungry had posted a picture of a ‘beauty and a beast’ in the run up to their bout and said she did not mind fighting ‘a man or a woman.’
The picture later disappeared from her social media profile.
The Algerian Olympic and Sports Committee filed an official complaint with the IOC to protest the online harassment of Khelif that amounts to ‘a serious violation of sports ethics and the Olympic Charter by one of the participants in the boxing tournament at the Paris Olympics’, according to a statement that was posted on the committee’s Facebook page.
The statement did not name the boxer who has allegedly posted disparaging comments of the Algerian, but warned that the IOC ‘has issued a final warning to delete every post that concerns our heroine Iman Khalif.’
It added: ‘We reserve the right to prosecute everyone who participated in the heinous campaign against our heroine Imane Khelif.’
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