Imane Khelif branded ‘a man’ in shambolic boxing gender row press conference

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The boxing governing body at the centre of the Olympics gender row branded the two athletes “men” in a shambolic Paris press conference that undermined its credibility.
“We don’t verify what they have between their legs”, said Umar Kremlev, the International Boxing Association’s president, in an ill-advised outburst as he launched into a series of wild tirades. Kremlev, whose body still receives financial backing from Russian state-owned Gazprom, also upped the ante in his war with the International Olympic Committee by standing by his slur that Thomas Bach is a “sodomite”.
Appearing an hour late via video-link from Moscow, Kremlev had been addressing the IBA’s expulsion of Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting last year. The pair are now both certain of medals as women in Paris despite being ruled ineligible by tests carried out by the IBA in 2022 and 2023.
“The tests show they were men,” said Kremlev in Russian, after it was explained that the pair were among four boxers who were initially suspected of being male. “We don’t verify what they have between their legs. We don’t know if they were born like that, or if some changes were made. The second tests confirmed the first tests. If people have doubts, refer to them. They can make their own tests.”
With boxing in crisis, the IBA had been attempting to reinforce its credibility in front of a packed room of journalists, but were questioned over apparent inconsistencies after Kremlev talked of “raised testosterone” while others talked of sex chromosome tests. One test in India last year and a prior test in Turkey in May 2022 “concluded the boxer’s DNA was that of a male consisting of XY chromosomes,” according to IBA correspondence sent to the International Olympic Committee in June 2023.
Khelif had earlier said the furore was having “massive effects” as she called for restraint. “I send a message to all the people of the world to uphold the Olympic principles and the Olympic Charter, to refrain from bullying all athletes, because this has effects,” she said.
Kremlev and his staff refused to hold back on their rhetoric as he launched fresh attacks on IOC president Bach, who has repeatedly insisted that Khelif and Lin are women. With biblical pictures behind him in his office, he said he called Bach a “sodomite” over a tableau of drag queens and other performers during the opening ceremony that appeared, to critics, to mock Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Last Supper”. 
“When I said sodomite I meant Thomas Bach and those who insisted on that [ceremony], who insisted on this decision,” he said. “I think they have been making fun of Christianity and the Bible. Sodom and Gomorrah existed. God had destroyed the two cities because they didn’t have any human values in them.”
Also speaking at the press conference was Ioannis Filippatos, a doctor brought in by the IBA, who said the pair were “biologically male”. 
Another IBA figure, Gabriele Martelli, president of the IBA Coaches Committee, went on to suggest an opponent could “die”. “Our sport is dangerous,” he said. “Where there is an unfair advantage, people can die. If, for any reason, one of the participants has extra power then you can can understand how dangerous this can be.”
There were protests following the press conference led by Algerian boxer Roumaysa Boualam, who chanted her country’s name afterwards. She told French journalists her team-mate Khelif “has been affected but she is very strong”.
A briefing document left on a table left within sight of journalists showed the IBA’s results showed “detected XY chromosomes in samples of both athletes”.
The IBA claim both boxers were tested among four athletes at an event in Istanbul in 2022, where they revealed adverse findings. They were then repeated at the 2023 competition in New Delhi. Two other boxers tested in Turkey  were cleared.
“The second tests confirmed the first tests,” Kremlev said. “If people have doubts, refer to them. They can make their own tests.”
Chris Roberts, the IBA’s British chief executive, questioned why the IOC had not acted on information they provided them with on the test results last year. “They have not done anything with it because they rely on own criteria – which is basically the passport,” he said.
Roberts also confirmed that Russian state-sponsored energy firm Gazprom were still an IBA sponsor. Kremlev said the Olympics were “trying to do everything to destroy feminine sports competitions”. “If the IBA was in charge this would not have happened,” he added. “Female boxing is being soiled.”
After listening to an often chaotic press conference, fairness for sport campaigners were unimpressed. Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at human-rights charity Sex Matters, told Telegraph Sport: “The IBA’s statement makes it clear that the IOC could have prevented this scandal by acting on the evidence in front of them. The IOC is responsible for two athletes being thrust into the global spotlight unnecessarily, and for the grief, physical pain and missed opportunities suffered by female boxers at these Olympics.
“It is also the IOC which has made this a ‘culture war’ issue. While critics and female athletes simply want a return to a science and evidence-based approach, the IOC has conflated sex with gender identity and framed valid scrutiny as a ‘witch hunt’. The IOC’s stance is untenable and the sooner it acts to genuinely return fairness to women’s sport, the better.”
Bach and his spokesman Adams have previously scorned the IBA for allegedly fuelling the flames around the furore. The IOC and the IBA organisations have been at war since 2019, when the IBA was suspended as the body leading Olympic boxing.
On Saturday, the IBA announced it would award prize money to Angela Carini, whose fight against Khelif was ended in 46 seconds, “as if she were an Olympic champion”.
Lots and lots of noise and very, very little light. Everyone came hoping for clarification about the status of Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting but there was little new information brought to light. 
Tom Morgan and Oliver Brown, both of whom were in the room, will try to pick the bones out of what we’ve just witnessed. 
Meanwhile, someone at the back of the room is now trying to lead a chant of, I think, “Viva La Khelif, one two three.”
Madness. 
“If athletes want to prove that they were born women, they have to do it themselves. They didn’t do that. We have no documents to prove this. If I was accused of not being a man, in that case I would bring over all the documents and go through all checks to prove that I am a real man. And I’m sitting here and I’m answering all your questions and I’m not scared of anything. 
“We don’t do like Thomas Bach and his team, trying to hide discussions.”
Kremlev talks of not being able to “define what they have between their legs” as he talks about the boxers, adding “there are doctors who can check it, who can verify these things”.
“They have very high level of testosterone”, he adds. “Today we got the test results that they allowed us to make and these test results show they have high levels of testerone, like men. “We cannot go further in our investigation – whether they were born like men or whether there were changes at a later stage.” “No proof that this woman is transgender or artificial woman,” he then says of Khelif.
Away from this press conference, Sebastian Coe, the chairman of World Athletics, has been speaking about the row in boxing. 
Coe is seen as a leading candidate to succeed Thomas Bach as the president of the IOC and, asked on Monday what his advice would be on the boxing issue, he said: “It’s unvarnished; have a policy. Be clear and have a policy.
“You’re never going to make everybody happy but you have to plant the flagpole down somewhere and that’s why it was so important for us. If you don’t, then you get into this sort of territory.”
Read more in Jeremy Wilson’s full report.
Journalists are speaking over Kremlev on the video link; the panel seem to be becoming more and more irritated by questions from the floor. There is an awful lot of noise and not a lot of light, I’m afraid. 
Kremlev clearly resents the IOC and the way his organisation has been sidelined. He wants to present his organisation as a champion of women’s sport but his incoherent ranting about the Old Testament makes it difficult to understand exactly where he or the IBA stand on women with abnormal characteristics.
Dr. Ioannis Filippatos, who is clearly here as a supposed voice of medical authority, has offered no more detail about exactly why Khelif and Lin were banned from IBA competition. His greatest moment of clarity so far has been in explaining that test results show that “this boxer is male”. But without being permitted to disclose the full results, this still has the atmosphere of claim and counter-claim. 
Chris Roberts, the CEO, says that his organisation did not want this to come to a head at the Olympics but claims that the IBA’s hand was forced when the Italian boxing federation complained about Khelif before her opening bout against an Italian fighter. He also says that he is unable to disclose more details about either fighter owing to demands made this morning by the Taiwanese and Algerian boxing federations. 
 
This press conference is shambolic. It seems increasingly unlikely that we are going to get any new information about Khelif or Lin, the two boxers at the centre of the row. 
Kremlev is being asked if he regrets or will apologise for calling Thomas Bach the “chief sodomite”. He goes off into a bizarre rant about Biblical scriture, which is now translated on the live stream.
He replies: “When I said sodomite, I meant Thomas Bach and those who made this declaration. They have been making fun of Christiantity and the Bible. In scripture, Sodom and Gomorrah existed and God destroyed these cities because they had no human value in them. 
“As president of an international federation and a firm believer in god, and a person defending human values and democracy I couldn’t keep silent. And this opening was arranged and designed by Thomas Bach and his friends. He did it in order to improve his PR status. As a Christian, believing in god, I disagree with this presentation of the scripture. And I would never like to see that happening again in the sport.”
…owing to demands made by the Algerian and Taiwanese federations earlier this morning. 
I am half-expecting a fight to break out at this IBA press conference. The atmosphere is truly toxic. Malfunctioning video leaks, exploding speakers, an hour-long delay, and a rambling tirade from the organisation’s Russian president via video link. There are serious questions to answer in this boxing scandal. But the longer this goes on – over two hours now – the clearer it becomes that the IBA executives are not the people to do so credibly.
Technical problems, hour-long delay, ear-piercing feedback on the speakers, a refusal to adress Gazprom funding, despite inviting any questions… and even the toilets are blocked. Shambles.
“I cannot say to you if she was born a woman,” says Filippatos, before asking why he is under attack. 
He adds: “The medical result and the laboratories say that this boxer is male. I have seen this result. We are not against Khelif, she is a very good boxer. 
“I was not in the hospital when she was born, I like Algeria!”
“In this case, we need the boxer to collaborate with the laboratories. She is a very good boxer but as a doctor I need to protect the women’s category.” 
 
Speaking after an hour’s delay via videolink, Kremlev spends 20 minutes from his office in Moscow ranting in Russian about Thomas Bach and also claiming he is an advocate for women’s rights. “They are scared of truth,” he says of the IOC.
“We will make sure we protect our women. Women athletes who have been spoiled, we will donate them money. We would like for this money to go back to athletes. We will not allow the sponsors and all the spectators, all the people passionate about sports.  I call upon the best judges, best investigators, best activists to defend women.”
He added that  “I just want to create a good situation” as the IOC is “trying to destroy everything for women’s sport”. He said “I stand up for corruption” as “colleagues are scared to talk”. “There must be a change,” he adds.
 
“The discussion, even now, is moving to a different side [IBA politics, finances etc]. We are here to talk about boxing,” he says. 
“We have procedures and rules. This is a sport! Boxing is different to other sports because if we lose because of an unfair advantage we might be hurt psychologically but our sport is dangerous. If there is an unfair advantage, people can die. We teach about concussion because we want coaches to understand their responsibility when they lead a boxer into the ring. 
“If anybody was banned for doping and then allowed to compete, there would be a debate. We had two cases of disqualification, and you need to comply with the rules to participate. If you cannot comply, that’s not discrimination, that’s the rules.”
Roberts, IBA CEO, says that the gap between the tests in early 2022 and then early 2023, was to ensure that the IBA had two different test results. He sasys that they needed the boxers to re-enter a tournament in order for the IBA to test them for a second time. He says, again, that the second tests were conclusive (at which point both boxers were barred from IBA women’s competitions). 
“We need to protect women’s sports and we know how to protect them.” 
 
Roberts says that question will be answered by the financial audit of IBA accounts, which will be published. 
“Are you here to cover the press conference or do you want the truth? If you don’t want the truth, I’ll stop now.”
The crux of Filippatos’s statement is that there can be no medical debate about what makes a woman. 
Filippatos says that countries demanded that the IBA determine whether certain boxers were men or women, which is why the testing of boxers started. 
“We want to know if these are men or women” he says. “We were careful not to make mistakes or create problems for boxers but we must be correct because we have two categories: men and women. To protect women, the women’s category must be only women. If you disagree, you must change the category to mixed.”
“I have done 5,000 operations and delivered I don’t know how many babies. It is not possible to say that you don’t know what a woman is. Let the doctors speak!”
He says he is a doctor of 30 years and “about 59 years old” and prefers practising medicine to conducting press conferences. He is also the European president of the IBA but says he is speaking here as a doctor. He is an expert particularly in IVF
“You must know the truth,” he says. And he adds that he respects Thomas Bach’s but not his view that the science behind Khelif and Lin’s bans is poor.
“For me, the science is not poor,” he says. 
Filippatos also says that a passport is no way to judge biological eligibility (as Thomas Bach has suggested), because passports can be changed but biology cannot. 
 
 
 
Umar Kremlev now addresses the conference on the restored video link, in Russian. 
I’m afraid that, unlike those in the press conference itself, I don’t have a translation headset so cannot confirm what Kremlev is saying. We will report his comments as soon as we can. 
The face of Umar Kremlev, president of the IBA, is being beamed out from behind the top table via live video link. He talks of women’s boxing being “killed”, the integrity of female sport being “destroyed”, and arguing that the IBA is the only body capable of standing up for female athletes. But this all comes across less as a careful enumeration of facts than an incoherent rant – as shown by his frequent and vitriolic attacks on Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee.
The IBA cannot share the tests themselves but they can disclose some details about the tests, apparently. 
Roberts says says that, on April 14 last year Khelif made an appeal to CAS, for which the IBA says it paid some of the costs. But CAS never went ahead with the court case. 
Roberts says that the IOC have chosen not to do anything with information from the IBA because, he says, the IOC prefers to judge eligibility on passports. 
He says the IBA never intended to bring this matter to a head at the Olympics but has done so because of Khelif’s first bout and complaints about her by the Italian boxing association (whose fighter lost to Khelif in the first round). We understand the difficulties this has caused for the boxing tournament, Roberts says. Roberts also says that the Taiwanese and Algerian boxing associations have demanded that the IBA does not disclose all information about both gender-row boxers. 
There’s been a “real storm” Roberts said. He confirms that the IBA shared details about both boxers with the IOC last year. 
Imane Khelif has been competing since 2018, Lin from 2017. Roberts says there were concerns from boxers and coaches at the world champs in 2022 in Istanbul in May, at which point blood tests and gender tests were taken. The results were published on May 24, 2022. 
The IBA tested both athletes again in 2023 because they wanted two tests and they wanted a gap between those tests. 
March 17 2023 was the dates of the second blood test on both boxers. Those tests demonstrated that the boxers were ineligible for women’s competition and they were removed from the world champs on March 26, 2023. 
 
In the opening remarks we learn that we will get details about why Khelif and Yu-Ting were disqualified from last year’s world championships. 
Umar Kremlev, the IBA president, is going to speak via videolink. But the sound isn’t working yet. So we’re getting Chris Roberts, the CEO…
But as Chris Roberts starts to speak, the live stream goes down. This is a bit of shambles, it must be said. 
It’s not as glamourous as the equestrianism at Versailles, certainly. 
For unknown reasons, the live stream of the IBA press conference (see above) is currently accompanied by a dancehall soundtrack. 
The men waiting to address the massed media in Paris are Dr. Ioannis Filippatos, the former medical chair of the IBA; Chris Roberts, CEO; and Gabriele Martelli, general secretary. The IBA president, Umar Kremlev, is on videolink. 
One notable feature in all the discussion over the past week has been the absence of women’s voices, at least in an official capacity. The IOC’s position has been expounded and elaborated on by Thomas Bach and his spokesman Mark Adams while the IBA are represented here today by three other men. 
The mood of this IBA press conference is starting to deteriorate. Now over 45 minutes late, with no explanation. The organisation has been shambolic. “Guys, you are wasting our time,” one journalist shouts.
While we wait for the IBA to turn up to the press conference they have called, a reminder that they have already been vocal about Khelif and Yu-Ting’s participation at these Games. 
Speaking to the Inside the Games website, IBA president Umar Kremlev said: “We will not stand by and allow women’s boxing to be destroyed,” adding: “There will be no athletes with high levels of testosterone competing in women’s boxing championships. We will defend women boxers wherever they compete including the Olympics.”
Read more about the IOC v IBA rivalry in Tom Morgan’s report from last week. 
In an even more colourful outburst in 2023, Kremlev described the IOC leaders as “prostitutes in sports who get involved in politics”.
Olympics Briefing newsletter
We were supposed to be under way at 12pm but the start time has been pushed back to 12.30pm. 
Telegraph Sport has two reporters at the press conference itself: Tom Morgan, our sports news correspondent, and Oliver Brown, our chief sports writer. 
A reminder also, you can follow everything that’s going on today at the Paris Games in our dedicated day ten live blog. (It’s not going well for Team GB’s pole vaulters).
The row between the IOC and the IBA has been the undercurrent in the Paris boxing gender row for the past week.
Speaking about the IBA’s testing process, Mark Adams, the IOC spokesman (and Keir Starmer’s best man) said that the Russian-run IBA has “no credibility” and that “the [gender] tests themselves, the process of the tests, the ad hoc nature of the tests are not legitimate”.
Adams also suggested that it was not a coincidence that the IBA chose to test certain female boxers after the defeat of a Russian boxer at the world championships.  
For its own part, the IBA ramped up the controversy around Khelif in particular by announcing that it would award prize money “as if she were an Olympic champion” to Angela Carini, the Italian boxer beaten by Khelif inside 46 seconds last week. 
It’s worth reminding everyone, before this press conference gets under way in a few minutes, that Algerians remain highly supportive of  Imane Khelif. 
Algerian president Abdelmadjid Tebboune wrote on X: “Congratulations Imane Khalif, you have honoured Algeria, Algerian women and Algerian boxing. We will stand by you no matter what your results are. Good luck in the next two rounds, and forward Imane Khelif. Long live Algeria.”
For more on the Algerian view, read our report from Ahmed Ismail in Algeria. 
Speaking over the weekend Khelif said that the scrutiny to which she has been subjected at the Olympics “harms human dignity”. 
She said: “I send a message to all the people of the world to uphold the Olympic principles and the Olympic Charter, to refrain from bullying all athletes, because this has effects, massive effects. It can destroy people, it can kill people’s thoughts, spirit and mind. It can divide people. And because of that, I ask them to refrain from bullying.”
She added: “God willing, this crisis will culminate in a gold medal, and that would be the best response.”
Separately over the weekend the IOC confirmed that the IBA had warned them about Khelif and Yu-Ting’s failed tests more than a year ago. However, the IOC refused to acknowledge the validity of those tests, apparently because they were conducted on an ad-hoc basis in the middle of the world championships. 
The other boxer causing controversy at the Olympics is Lin Yu-Ting, from Taiwan, who, like Khelif, is through to the semi-finals (but in a different weight category). 
Yu-Ting won bronze at last year’s IBA-administered world championships but had that medal stripped from her as a result of the failed gender test. She had previously won world championship gold medals (in 2022 and 2018). 
Part of the confusion about the status of both Yu-Ting and Khelif is that they have apparently been gender-tested (we still don’t know how) multiple times but have only been stripped of certain medals by the boxing governing body. 
With luck, today’s press conference will explain some of these anomalies. 
Today – the middle Monday of the Olympic – is the only day of the Games where no boxing takes place. And yet the biggest story of the day could emerge in the next hour or so. 
What we’re here for is a press conference held by the International Boxing Association [IBA]. To recap, the IBA is the governing body who threw Imane Khelif and other boxers out of their 2023 women’s world championships after they allegedly failed gender tests conducted by the IBA. The results of those tests apparently showed that Khelif possesses the XY, or male, chromosome.
Umar Kremlev, the IBA president, told a Russian news agency that, “based on the results of the tests, it was proven that they have XY [male] chromosomes. Such athletes were excluded from the competition.”
The test results themselves, however, have never been shared. 
Despite that disqualification in 2023, Khelif has been permitted to fight at the Paris Olympics – where she has won her first two bouts – because the IOC runs Olympic boxing itself, having stripped the IBA of that privilege after a corruption scandal at the Tokyo Games.
Effectively, the IBA and the IOC are at war – a fact that was made clear when Thomas Bach, the IOC president, addressed the media on Saturday. Bach also said in that press conference that there was ‘no doubt’ Khelif is a woman. 
Now, at 12pm UK time, the IBA will have their say on the Khelif situation.