World Boxing is to announce updated gender eligibility rulings in “two to three weeks”, following a consultation on how the sport tackles an issue which threatened to derail last year’s Olympic Games.
The president of the sport’s governing body, Boris van der Vorst, said World Boxing intended to have a resolution to an “extremely complex issue” before the World Boxing Cup, with the event beginning on 31 March in Brazil.
A row erupted at the Paris Olympics over the presence of two boxers competing in the female category, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting. Both athletes had grown up and always competed as women but were alleged to have failed gender eligibility tests prior to the Games by boxing’s disgraced former governing body, the International Boxing Association (IBA). No evidence for these claims was publicly provided.
Both women had competed without issue in the Tokyo Games in 2021 and went on to win gold medals in Paris despite the furore.
Boxing at both Olympics came under the control of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), after the IBA was effectively exiled due to alleged failures of governance. The IOC does not have a blanket criteria for gender eligibility, allowing individual sports to decide the metrics they use.
“I’m for all the boxers,” Van der Vorst told The Guardian. “What happened in Paris was very sad, and I felt there was no proper procedure based on the accusations from the previous international federation [the IBA]. That felt very inappropriate to me.”
Van der Vorst explained that World Boxing had formed a working group taking advice from medical experts and the Independent Council for Women’s Sports to determine its new guidelines, and he cautioned against the politicisation of what has become an extremely thorny issue.
“The main objective is to have a level playing field that assures safety for all participants,” he added. “We are waiting for the policy from our experts, but the priority for me is sporting integrity and safety.”
World Boxing has recently cemented its status as the sport’s sole governing body after the IOC officially welcomed boxing back into the Olympic fold, with a unanimous vote granting it the right to run the competition in Los Angeles in 2028.
Khelif – who won gold in the 66kg category in Paris – stated this week she is aiming to defend her title in LA, despite Donald Trump adding his voice to the dispute and falsely claiming she is transgender.
“I am not transgender,” the 25-year-old said in an ITV interview on Wednesday. “This does not concern me and it does not intimidate me.”
