Luca Hamori, the Hungarian who will face gender fighter Imane Khelif on Saturday, has shared an image showing a female boxer facing a horned beast in a ring.
On a day when furore continued to dominate the Olympics (with the victory of the second boxer who had been suspended from an earlier competition for failing a gender test), the Hungarian Boxing Association protested to Games chiefs and its own Olympic committee at the prospect of the fight.
Hamori said she is “not afraid” of her opponent and claimed Italy’s Angela Carini “gave up” when she abandoned her fight with Khelif after 46 seconds on Thursday.
And the 23-year-old took to Instagram to repost an image showing a slim, long-haired woman in blue shorts taking on a muscular creature dressed in red towering over her beneath the Olympic rings.
“If she or he is a man, it will be a bigger victory for me if I win,” Hamori had previously said of Khelif, who was disqualified from last year’s World Championships after failing a gender test according to officials from the then governing body IBA.
Imane Khelif’s upcoming opponent Luca Hamori has shared a photo of a horned beast in the ring with a female boxer ahead of their fight.
Hamori insisted he is not afraid, but the Hungarian Boxing Association has expressed concern
Khelif, who failed a gender test for the 2023 world championships, won her first fight when her opponent retired after 46 seconds.
“Let’s do it. I’m looking forward to the fight. In my club, at home, I only have boys and male teammates. It’s nothing new for me.”
HBA board member Lajos Berko told a Hungarian broadcaster about the protest and said the association was also considering legally challenging Khelif’s presence. “I am very sad about the scandal and having to talk about a topic that is not compatible with sport,” he said. “It is unacceptable and scandalous.”
In the same ring that had witnessed Carini’s tearful early exit a day earlier, Taiwanese Lin Yu-ting, who was also banned from the World Championships, easily advanced to the quarter-finals after dominating her opponent from Uzbekistan.
The 28-year-old Taiwanese featherweight scored a unanimous decision over Sitora Turdibekova before refusing, along with her opponent, to speak to reporters.
The IBA, which has been stripped of its right to regulate Olympic boxing due to governance issues, ruled that both failed unspecified gender tests but provided no documentation.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said it was “incredibly uncomfortable” to watch Khelif fight and added she would speak to sporting bodies about “inclusion, fairness and safety”.
Former US President Donald Trump has vowed to “keep men out of women’s sports” while Britain’s most successful female boxer of all time said the situation was “unfair” and “dangerous”.
Angela Carini fell to her knees after leaving the fight and was seen crying in the ring
Algerian national team responds to “unfounded attacks” against Khelif ahead of Olympics
Carini was hit twice in the first round before leaving the fight after 46 seconds.
The IOC, which stripped the IBA of the right to stage boxing at the Games over governance issues, criticised the conviction. Spokesman Mark Adams said the IBA’s decision to remove the pair last year was made “arbitrarily” and said Khelif “was born a woman, was registered as a woman, lived her life as a woman, boxed as a woman and has a female passport”. He added: “There has been some confusion about whether she is somehow a man fighting a woman. This is simply not the case scientifically.”
Adams also questioned the IBA’s evidence. “We don’t know if the evidence was accurate,” he said. “We don’t know if we should believe the evidence.”
Meanwhile, Carini said on Friday that he “wants to apologize” to Khelif.
“All this controversy makes me sad,” she told Gazzetta dello Sport. “I feel sorry for my opponent too. If the IOC said she can fight, I respect that decision.”
Carini, 25, also expressed regret at not shaking Khelif’s hand afterwards.
“It wasn’t something I intended to do,” she said. “I actually want to apologize to her and everyone else. I was angry that my Olympics were gone.”
He added that if he were to meet Khelif again, he would “hug her.”