The Olympics are about to celebrate with two female boxers who have been accused of being men after the second of the two won her semi-final tonight and has a chance of winning gold.
Lin Yu-Ting, 28, of Taiwan, defeated Esra Yildiz, 27, of Turkey, for a place in the final of the women’s 57kg category.
She joins Algeria’s Imane Khelif, 25, in the Olympic boxing finals after both had to weather a storm of opposition to their participation in the Paris Olympics.
Yu-Ting’s progress tonight to reach the final has dealt a major blow to her critics, as well as to those of Khelif, who has fought to secure gold amid the biggest controversies of Paris 2024.
Olympic chiefs will also feel they have been vindicated in their decision not to ban her and Khelif after the International Boxing Association said they had failed gender eligibility tests during a tournament in India last year.
Tonight she let her boxing do the talking and won unanimously against her opponent, who was two inches shorter.
Yu-Ting braved the storm that followed her into the ring and bowed and greeted the 13,000 people who attended Roland Garros, which has been converted from a tennis stadium to a boxing arena and will be the scene of two unmissable fights.
Khelif’s box office appeal has prompted Olympic chiefs to slot his fight with China’s Liu T=Yang as the final bout on the Friday night card to allow U.S. and global television audiences to tune in after a day’s work.
Lin Yu-Ting, 28, and Khelif, 25, were disqualified from last year’s women’s world championships because they both failed key gender tests.
Gilles Johanne, a 49-year-old boxing fan living in Paris, said: “This is fantastic for the Olympics. I’m very happy she won. I don’t care what other people say about her. She’s an Olympic athlete like everyone else.”
“My wife and I feel very sorry for this young lady. She must have been very lonely this week.”
But Yu-Ting, who is 1.75m tall, was registered as female at birth, as was Khelif, who has a female passport.
Olympic chiefs have defended the participation in Paris 2024 for both Khelif and Yu-Ting, who began boxing at the age of 13.
The boxer underwent additional testing by Taiwanese sports administrators ahead of the Olympics, which confirmed her eligibility after last year’s disqualification.
Olympic officials called Yu-Ting’s allegations discriminatory and said they were a deliberate attempt to undermine the boxer’s mental state.
The IOC said it made its eligibility decisions on the boxers based on gender-related rules that applied at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
Several sports have updated their gender rules in the past three years, including the World Swimming Federation, the World Athletics Federation and the International Cycling Union. The athletics body also tightened rules on athletes with differences in sexual development last year.
The IOC is in charge of boxing in Paris because it revoked the Olympic status of the International Boxing Association following years of governance problems, lack of financial transparency and many perceived cases of corruption in judging and refereeing.
The IBA is controlled by its president, Russian Umar Kremlev, who hired the Russian state-owned company Gazprom as his main sponsor and moved much of the IBA’s operations to Russia.
However, Olympic officials say the issue of the two boxers is a “minefield” and that no forensic, indisputable scientific evidence has been provided to prove the two athletes were not women.
IOC chief Bach said: “We are talking about women’s boxing. We have two boxers who were born as women, who were raised as women, who have a women’s passport, who have competed for many years as women. That is the clear definition of a woman.”
But IBA genetic testing showed that Khelif and Yu-Ting both have XY male chromosomes in their DNA, but neither is transgender.
Celebrities including JK Rowling, British Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies and two-time Olympic gold medal-winning former boxer Nicola Adams have spoken out against her participation in women’s sport.
Today JK Rowling doubled down on her opposition to boxers who fail gender testing.
She wrote on X: ‘Commentators who claim that critics of the IOC’s reliance on documents rather than sex testing think Khelif is trans are straw men. I am not claiming that Khelif is trans. My objection, and that of many others, is to male violence against women being made an Olympic sport.’
Davies said: “This is outrageous. The IOC is a disgrace. They are effectively legalising the beating of women. This must stop! What the hell is wrong with them?”
Former Prime Minister Liz Truss asked: “When will this madness end? Men cannot become women. Why is the British Government not opposing this?”
But Olympic chiefs criticised what they described as an online “hate” campaign against the boxers.
Khelif’s quarter-final opponent, Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori, had posted a photo of a “beauty and a beast” in the run-up to their fight and said she did not care whether she fought “a man or a woman”.
The image later disappeared from her social media profile.
The Algerian Olympic and Sports Committee has filed an official complaint with the IOC to protest against online harassment of Khelif which amounts to “a serious violation of sporting ethics and the Olympic Charter by one of the participants in the boxing tournament of the Paris Olympic Games,” according to a statement posted on the committee’s Facebook page.
The statement did not name the boxer who allegedly posted disparaging comments about the Algerian, but warned that the IOC “has issued a final warning to remove any publications concerning our heroine Iman Khalif.”
He added: “We reserve the right to prosecute all those who participated in the heinous campaign against our heroine Imane Khelif.”