Imane Khelif is not the only one throwing vicious right hooks in Paris this week. “We will not stand by and watch the destruction of women’s boxing,” she said, as the International Boxing Association launched its war cry against the International Olympic Committee. “Athletes with high testosterone levels will not compete in women’s boxing championships. We will defend women boxers wherever they compete, including in the Olympics.”

At first glance, the head of the IBA, Umar Kremlev, Inside the Games website and everyone else within earshot simply echoed the sentiments of the elite campaigners for fair sport. Studies show that higher testosterone poses a major safety risk to women in any combat sport. Science shows that men punch 2.6 times harder than women, the biggest documented performance advantage in any sport. So the IOC must swallow the criticism this week from the likes of Nicola Adams, Judy Murray, JK Rowling and even Donald Trump.

But behind the scenes this week, as the drama boiled over, the main source of anger among senior figures at the IOC was that the IBA had been able to pull ahead. The IOC and IBA have been at full-scale war since at least 2019, when the boxing body was suspended over concerns about finances, governance, ethics, refereeing and judging.

In an unprecedented move, the IBA has been stripped of its status as the sport’s world governing body in 2023. The decision comes four months after the body disqualified Khelif and Lin Yu-ting from the 2023 World Championships.

But it took Khelif, who has failed IBA sex tests twice, 46 seconds to win the opening round, sending the boxing community into a renewed momentum.

International Olympic Committee (IOC) spokesman Mark Adams said Algeria’s Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin were concerned they could face a “witch hunt”, be “stigmatised” and be dragged into “culture wars”.

But senior sources in the sport in Britain say the IOC has itself to blame for leaving the two in the lurch. Their failure to resolve a long-running dispute with the IBA, which has governed boxing at the Olympics for many years, has cost them dearly. Boxing has only been organised by the IOC in Paris and Tokyo, rather than the IBA, and that is partly why the sport faces an existential threat at LA 2028.

The split had become irreversibly toxic long before Paris. Last year, Kremlev described the IOC leadership as “sports whores involved in politics”. Critics of Kremlev are equally scathing. Critics point to the Moscow-born leader’s ties to Vladimir Putin and accuse him of spending too much on publicity. He was also slow to tear up an IBA sponsorship deal with Russia’s state energy supplier, Gazprom, after the war in Ukraine.

But it’s entirely the IOC’s fault that they’ve suddenly given Kremlev the opportunity to present himself as one of the good guys. The sport has known since at least 2016 that a gender crisis at the Olympics – whether through DSD or the inclusion of trans athletes – was only a matter of time.

The rules have been rewritten, but in short: the IOC has delegated decision-making powers to individual sports to set their rules based on “robust and peer-reviewed science”… which demonstrates “a consistent, unfair and disproportionate competitive advantage and/or an unavoidable risk to the safety of athletes.”

This has clearly become unworkable in boxing since the IBA’s divorce, so decisions largely fall to national Olympic committees and federations. Now, as the current crisis rightfully reaches deafening levels, Kremlev, who reportedly sanctioned disqualifications last year, sits comfortably.

Mike McAtee, executive director of USA Boxing, is one of the IBA’s harshest critics. Washington Post Kremlev would ultimately want “Olympic-style boxing to fail.” Instead, he hopes World Boxing, which McAtee helped found and which the IOC will one day govern, possibly as early as 2028, Olympic boxing.

With so much at stake, the IOC is now openly trying to undermine the gender tests imposed by the IBA on two boxers. Last weekend, Telegraph Sports The two IBA disqualifications were clearly stated in footnotes in the official biographies of Paris 2024, which was one of the first outlets to report the two cases. But by Friday morning, those IBA tests had disappeared from the two athletes’ profiles, replaced by a link to the latest lengthy IOC statement.

Mark Adams has also been increasingly emboldened to take action to undermine the IBA’s gender tests for Lin and Khelif at his daily press conferences.

“We have no information whatsoever on the tests,” Adams said Friday. “My understanding is that they were put together overnight. There was a change in the results, so we don’t want to go there. I think if you start working on suspicions, then we’re in trouble.”

Names such as Nicola Adams, Murray and Rowling may counter such claims by recalling what they saw on Thursday, when Italy’s Angela Carini was reduced to tears by just two punches.

Whatever happens on the rest of the Olympic boxing program, the gender fight from Paris will be top of mind — and that’s a problem for both the sport and the IOC.

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