Imane Khelif is unlikely to be forced to return the gold medal the boxing star won at the Paris Olympics last summer, despite IBA chief Umar Kremlev calling on the Algerian to return it.
Khelif’s gender was the source of much debate 12 months ago, with the fighter previously failing two gender eligibility tests at the World Championships.
Earlier this week, in an interview with the Daily Mail, Kremlev demanded that Khelif return the gold medal secured in France last summer.
“The IOC [International Olympic Committee] is not fighting for the fairness in sport,” he told the newspaper.
“The IOC is giving away medals based on their political interests. Imane Khelif should be made to return the Olympic medal from Paris.”
However, that’s extremely unlikely to happen despite the controversy surrounding Khelif’s eligibility continuing to rumble on.
Earlier this month, speaking to Newsweek, a legal expert elaborated on the situation and said that the IOC were powerless to take action because they’d created the rules.
Doraine Lambelet Coleman, a Thomas L. Perkins Distinguished Professor of Laws at Duke Law School, said: “The IOC would not revoke medals won by athletes who were eligible according to the rules it set for the boxing competition in Paris.
“Unlike the eligibility rules set by the IBA and now WB, those rules did not require competitors to be biologically female.”
The IOC have always insisted that Khelif, along with Taiwan’s Lin Y-ting, were well within their rights to compete.
IOC chief Thomas Bach said last August: “Let’s be very clear, we are talking about women’s boxing.”We have two boxers who are 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.
“This is the clear definition of a woman. There was never any doubt about them being a woman.”
Bach also took aim at the IBA at the time, insisting that ‘aggression’ and ‘abuse’ towards both fighters was ‘totally unacceptable’.
“What we see now is that some want to own the definition of who is a woman,” he fumed.
“There I can only invite them to come up with a scientific-based, new definition of who is a woman and how can somebody being born, raised, competed and having a passport as a woman cannot be considered a woman.
“If they are coming up with something, we are ready to listen, we are ready to look into it, but we will not take part in a sometimes politically-motivated, cultural war.
“Allow me to say that what is going on in this context in social media with all this hate speech, with this aggression and abuse fuelled by this agenda is totally unacceptable.”
Last summer, Khelif’s father was also forced to speak out on the subject.
He insisted the boxer was a ‘strong girl’ and lashed out at Angela Carini, who was beaten by Khelif on the boxer’s route to Olympic gold.
“She was raised as a girl. She’s a strong girl. I raised her to be hard-working and brave. She has a strong will to work and to train,” Omar Khelif commented.
“The Italian opponent she faced was unable to defeat my daughter because my daughter was stronger and she was softer.”
