IMANE KHELIF

Tthe arabic boxer in the middle of a thousand of protests

Imane khelif

Khelif was born in Aïn Sidi Ali, Laghouat Province. When she was two months old, her family moved to Biban Mesbahl. She has always loved sport, as her father says. In fact, she originally played football before switching to boxing. She was actually very good at boxing and even had to move to Tiaret to take part in training session. As she was poor, she sold bread and scrap metal to be able to afford the bus ticket.

who is Imane khelif and what is her cultural background?

She started to take part in some competitions, competing in the 2018 Women's World Championships, where she finished 17th after being eliminated in the first round. Actually, the 2024 Olympic Games were not her first, she represented Algeria at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, where she was eliminated in the quarter-finals. In 2022, Khelif secured a second-place at the Women's World Championships.

However, this fight only lasted 46 seconds and is classified as abandon. That’s why Carini and Khelif only exchanged a few punches before Carini walked away and abandoned the bout. After Carini has been hit she started crying and complaining saying that it was unfair and her opponent should not have fought her.

In 2023, she qualified for the 2024 Olympic Games and took part in the women’s 66kg boxing competition. She parteciped in 4 fights and also won a gold medal in one of them. The first of these was a peliminary fight in which she had to compete against Angela Carini, an Italian boxer.

What happened during 2024 olympycs?

The accusations were that Imane was clearly a man or that she had been “biologically altered” and therefore it was not fair to let Imane fight against a woman. This led to a phenomenon where people just hearing the rumours believed this information to be true and started spreading this false information, even through social media. The false claims that Khelif was male were fuelled by Khelif's disqualification from the 2023 Women's World Boxing Championships, from which she was suspended following a medical examination by the International Boxing Association (IBA), more specifically gender eligibility tests.

why people accused her?

But even if Imane has not published any news about this, we know from these analyses and also from other sources that she has an elevated testosterone level in her body. Just a reminder: men have chromosomes XY and women XX, like Imane. Consequently she is a woman, more precisely an intersex woman. This means that she has a higher testosterone level than usual, but she is a woman in every respect.

Experts estimate that up to 1.7% of the population is born with intersex traits. And Imane is not the only case of intersexuality at the Olympics. We have Stella Walsh and Heinrich Ratjen, for example, in 1936, or Érika Kelly Pereira, in 2000 and 2004. In the 1960s, all athletes at the Olympic Games were tested for their gender using the X-Chromatin test. Over the years, these tests have been changed. in 1992, the SRY test was required, and due to criticism that this test did not provide reliable results, testorone tests are now simply carried out.

is it right for intersex people to participate at olympics?

I think that since every year there are some tests on the structure of DNA, cromosomes and doping carried out by experts, we cannot say simply on the basis of rumors whether an athlete like Imane Khelif should or should not participate in a particular competition. If these conditions could be dangerous for the opponent, the Olympic specialists will not let this athlete compete in a certain competition, but with some others who have the same conditions, in order to make the challenge equal.