Zsolt Gyulay, the president of the Hungarian Olympic Committee (MOB), has initiated consultations with the sports director of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to discuss the situation around the “masculine-looking” Algerian boxer Imane Khelif who is set to face Hungary’s Luca Hamori in the women’s boxing quarterfinals at the Paris Games.
The MOB said in a statement that it will also consult with the leadership of the Italian National Olympic Committee, along with other national committees, after Khelif’s Italian opponent “withdrew from the one-sided bout after barely 40 seconds”.
The MOB said that as a national Olympic committee it respected the IOC’s regulations, but supported equality among women athletes and fair competition.
The committee said it was on the side of Hungarian Olympians “in all circumstances” and was doing everything possible to enforce the interests of the Hungarian athletes in this situation as well. It said it was constantly exploring its options provided by the regulations for protecting Hamori’s right to fair competition.
The MOB said it was convinced that equal opportunities for women must not be limited to an equal proportion of male and female athletes at the Olympics. The principle of equal opportunity, it added, demanded that only women with female biological characteristics compete in the women’s field.
“Otherwise, women athletes’ right to equal opportunities and fair competition is fundamentally violated,” the committee said. It said that if the rules for participation in Olympic boxing did not fully ensure this, the regulations should be reviewed and modified if necessary. “The rules must clearly ensure that only women can compete in the women’s field,” it added.
The IOC defended Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting in a statement on Thursday, saying they had faced “aggression” from the International Boxing Association (IBA) last year when it made an “arbitrary decision” to disqualify them from the world championships.
Bence Retvari, an MP of the co-ruling Christian Democrats, said on Facebook that “half the world is outraged that a genetically male boxer is allowed to fight with women” and blamed for the incident “the gender lobby … LGBT activists working to include men among female athletes”. “Law will never change genetic characteristics,” he said.
Activists “with anti-discrimination and equal opportunities on their rainbow flag … have just stripped women of equal opportunities and violated their dignity,” he insisted.
“Those genetically female should compete with women and those genetically male should fight with men … it is important to eliminate legal discrimination between the sexes but it does not mean that the sexes, in a legal sense, should be eliminated,” he said, adding that “we have equal rights but we are not uniform”.
