Lifestyle
What to know about the gender controversy sweeping Olympic boxing
Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, left, and Algeria’s Imane Khelif have competed in boxing competitions as women for years. But their presence in Paris is being scrutinized by some after they failed a vague gender eligibility test last year.
John Locher/AP and Aijaz Rahi/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
John Locher/AP and Aijaz Rahi/AP
NPR is in Paris for the 2024 Summer Olympics. For more of our coverage from the Games, head to our latest updates.
Women’s boxing is at the center of the latest Olympics controversy as critics take issue with the participation of two athletes — Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan — who have failed gender eligibility tests in the past.
Both Khelif and Lin identify and have long competed as women, but were disqualified from the 2023 women’s world championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA) for what it called failure to meet “eligibility rules.”
Olympic organizers are defending their right to compete in Paris and questioning the validity of those unspecified tests and the fairness of their previous disqualification, which they said happened without due process.
“The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure — especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years,” the International Olympic Committee said in a statement Thursday.
The conservative outcry started after Khelif won her match against Angela Carini of Italy on Thursday in somewhat dramatic fashion.
Carini quit just 46 seconds into the bout after Khelif’s punches dislodged her chinstrap and bloodied her shorts. After deciding to withdraw, she fell to her knees sobbing in the ring and refused to shake hands with Khelif.
“I have never been hit so hard in my life,” Carini tearfully told reporters afterward.
She said she had stopped fighting because of nose pain, but also said it wasn’t her place to pass judgment on whether Khelif should compete.
“If an athlete is this way, and in that sense it’s not right or it is right, it’s not up to me to decide,” Carini added.
Khelif didn’t speak to the media other than a quick comment to BBC Sport: “I’m here for the gold — I fight everybody.”
She is set to return to the ring Saturday for a quarterfinal matchup against Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori.
Hamori has accepted the fight, saying she is “not scared” of Khelif. But the Hungarian Boxing Association is striking a different tone: The Associated Press reported on Friday that the organization is sending “letters of protest” about the matchup to the IOC and Hungary’s own Olympic committee.
On Friday, Lin emerged victorious in her preliminary-round fight against Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova, winning 5-0 by unanimous decision but without much fanfare in the crowd.
She is headed to the quarterfinals on Sunday, one victory away from her first Olympic medal.
Who is Lin?
Lin, 28, a two-time world champion, has been competing for over a decade.
According to her Olympic bio, Lin joined an athletics team as a child “to achieve good results in athletics and win awards to help out financially.” She switched to boxing in middle school.
She made her Olympic debut at the Tokyo Games, though left without a medal.
Still, the southpaw has won many other titles — including bronze in featherweight at the 2019 Women’s World Boxing Championships, gold at bantamweight in 2018 and gold in featherweight in 2022.
She also won a bronze medal at the 2023 world championships, but lost it after she was disqualified. It went to the opponent she had defeated in the quarterfinals, Bulgaria’s Svetlana Kamenova Staneva.
Who is Khelif?
Khelif, at 25 years old and 5’10”, has been competing since 2018. She entered Paris with a 9-5 professional record, according to the New York Times.
She made her first Olympic appearance at the Tokyo Games in 2021, where she lost in the quarterfinal round to Ireland’s Kellie Harrington (and didn’t face any false allegations about her gender at the time, as many of her defenders are now noting).
Khelif won the African and Mediterranean Championships in 2022 and reached the final of the IBA Women’s World Championships that same year. She took home silver, after a defeat by another Irish boxer, Katie Broadhurst.
Khelif also reached the finals of the 2023 world championships in New Delhi but was disqualified by organizers the day before they began in March.
Why were the athletes disqualified last year?
The IBA said in a statement at the time that Khelif and Lin had “failed to meet eligibility rules, following a test conducted by an independent laboratory.”
IBA President Umar Krevlev told Russian state media that it was “proven they have XY chromosomes” — which is seen in men, as opposed to the XX genotype of women.
It is medically possible for women to have male chromosomes, in rare cases. Separately, there are a number of health conditions — most notably, polycystic ovary syndrome — that can cause women to produce excess male hormones.
In a new statement released this week, the IBA clarified that Khelif and Lin had not undergone a testosterone exam, but were “subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential.”
“This test conclusively indicated that both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors,” they wrote.
Why are they eligible for the Olympics?
Algeria’s Imane Khelif, right, walks beside Italy’s Angela Carini after winning their women’s 66kg preliminary boxing match on Thursday.
John Locher/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
John Locher/AP
The IBA is no longer the governing body of Olympic boxing.
The IOC — which had already overseen boxing competitions for the Tokyo Olympics — officially voted to derecognize it in June 2023, after a years-long dispute over the integrity of its bouts and judging and transparency of management.
Olympic officials took issue with how presidents from Uzbekistan and Russia ran the IBA, as well as the fact that its sole sponsor was a Russian state energy firm, according to the Associated Press.
The IOC has repeatedly defended the athletes’ right to compete in Paris, casting doubt on the process that disqualified them last year and pointing to their female legal identities.
“They are women in their passports and it’s stated that this is the case, that they are female,” spokesperson Mark Adams told reporters earlier this week. Notably, there is no right to change one’s legal gender under Algerian law.
In its Thursday statement, the IOC confirmed that all athletes participating in the boxing tournament “comply with the competition’s eligibility and entry regulations, as well as all applicable medical regulations.” It said it used the Tokyo boxing rules as the baseline for this year’s regulations.
It called Khelif and Lin, whom it did not identify by name, “the victims of a sudden arbitrary decision by the IBA.”
The IOC said it is “saddened by the abuse that the two athletes are currently receiving,” and stressed the need for National Boxing Federations to “reach a consensus around a new International federation” for boxing to be included in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
On Friday, spokesperson Adams reminded reporters that the IOC stopped blanket sex testing in 1999, and that “even if there were a sex test that everyone agreed with, I don’t think anyone wants to see a return to some of the scenes.” He acknowledged that the situation has become a minefield.
“And unfortunately, as with all minefields, we want a simple explanation,” he added. “Everyone wants a black-and-white explanation of how we can determine this. That explanation does not exist, neither in the scientific community, nor anywhere else.”
For more about sex testing in elite women’s sports, check out the new podcast Tested, from NPR and the CBC.
What are critics and supporters saying?
Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, left, reacts after defeating Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova in their women’s 57 kg preliminary boxing match on Friday.
John Locher/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
John Locher/AP
After Khelif’s win, the backlash was swift, especially in conservative circles.
Author J.K. Rowling — who has been criticized for her transphobic views in recent years — falsely labeled her a man, in a tweet that has garnered over 400,000 likes. Former President Donald Trump shared a video of the match on Truth Social, writing in all caps, “I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!”
Riley Gaines, a widely-followed former collegiate swimmer who describes herself as a “leader defending women’s single-sex spaces,” tweeted that “men don’t belong in women’s sports.” Tesla CEO Elon Musk amplified her tweet, adding, “Absolutely.”
Vlogger-turned-WWE wrestler Logan Paul also slammed Khelif as a man, tweeting that the match was “the purest form of evil unfolding right before your eyes.” He later deleted his post and wrote, “I might be guilty of spreading misinformation along with the entirety of this app.”
Foreign officials have also weighed in.
Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told the Italian news agency ANSA that the fight between Carini and Khelif was unfair.
“I think that athletes who have male genetic characteristics should not be admitted to women’s competitions,” she said, according to Reuters. “And not because you want to discriminate against someone, but to protect the right of female athletes to be able to compete on equal terms.”
Italy’s family and sports ministers have also voiced concerns about the lack of clarity around gender eligibility criteria, suggesting that uniform international criteria would assuage “suspicion” and protect athletes’ safety.
Algeria’s Olympic committee is defending Khelif, issuing a statement on Wednesday condemning what it called her “unethical targeting” with “baseless propaganda.”
“Such attacks on her personality and dignity are deeply unfair, especially as she prepares for the pinnacle of her career at the Olympics,” it added, per Reuters.
Meanwhile, Taiwanese officials have thrown their support behind Lin.
Pan Men-an, secretary-general for Taiwan’s presidential office, said on social media that it is wrong for the athlete to be “subjected to humiliation, insults and verbal bullying just because of your appearance and a controversial verdict in the past.”
Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s first female president, wrote on X that Lin is “an athlete who is fearless in the face of challenges, whether they come from inside or outside the ring.”
Timothée Chalamet plays a shoe salesman who dreams of becoming the greatest table tennis player in the world in Marty Supreme.
A24
hide caption
toggle caption
A24
Last year, while accepting a Screen Actors Guild award for A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet told the audience, “I want to be one of the greats; I’m inspired by the greats.” Many criticized him for his immodesty, but I found it refreshing: After all, Chalamet has never made a secret of his ambition in his interviews or his choice of material.
In his best performances, you can see both the character and the actor pushing themselves to greatness, the way Chalamet did playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, which earned him the second of two Oscar nominations. He’s widely expected to receive a third for his performance in Josh Safdie’s thrilling new movie, Marty Supreme, in which Chalamet pushes himself even harder still.
Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a 23-year-old shoe salesman in 1952 New York who dreams of being recognized as the greatest table-tennis player in the world. He’s a brilliant player, but for a poor Lower East Side Jewish kid like Marty, playing brilliantly isn’t enough: Simply getting to championship tournaments in London and Tokyo will require money he doesn’t have.
And so Marty, a scrappy, speedy dynamo with a silver tongue and inhuman levels of chutzpah, sets out to borrow, steal, cheat, sweet-talk and hustle his way to the top. He spends almost the entire movie on the run, shaking down friends and shaking off family members, hatching new scams and fleeing the folks he’s already scammed, and generally trying to extricate himself from disasters of his own making.
Marty is very loosely based on the real-life table-tennis pro Marty Reisman. But as a character, he’s cut from the same cloth as the unstoppable antiheroes of Uncut Gems and Good Time, both of which Josh Safdie directed with his brother Benny. Although Josh directed Marty Supreme solo, the ferocious energy of his filmmaking is in line with those earlier New York nail-biters, only this time with a period setting. Most of the story unfolds against a seedy, teeming postwar Manhattan, superbly rendered by the veteran production designer Jack Fisk as a world of shadowy game rooms and rundown apartments.
Early on, though, Marty does make his way to London, where he finagles a room at the same hotel as Kay Stone, a movie star past her 1930s prime. She’s played by Gwyneth Paltrow, in a luminous and long-overdue return to the big screen. Marty is soon having a hot fling with Kay, even as he tries to swindle her ruthless businessman husband, Milton Rockwell, played by the Canadian entrepreneur and Shark Tank regular Kevin O’Leary.
Marty Supreme is full of such ingenious, faintly meta bits of stunt casting. The rascally independent filmmaker Abel Ferrara turns up as a dog-loving mobster. The real-life table-tennis star Koto Kawaguchi plays a Japanese champ who beats Marty in London and leaves him spoiling for a rematch. And Géza Röhrig, from the Holocaust drama Son of Saul, pops up as Marty’s friend Bela Kletzki, a table tennis champ who survived Auschwitz. Bela tells his story in one of the film’s best and strangest scenes, a death-camp flashback that proves crucial to the movie’s meaning.
In one early scene, Marty brags to some journalists that he’s “Hitler’s worst nightmare.” It’s not a stretch to read Marty Supreme as a kind of geopolitical parable, culminating in an epic table-tennis match, pitting a Jewish player against a Japanese one, both sides seeking a hard-won triumph after the horrors of World War II.
The personal victory that Marty seeks would also be a symbolic one, striking a blow for Jewish survival and assimilation — and regeneration: I haven’t yet mentioned a crucial subplot involving Marty’s close friend Rachel, terrifically played by Odessa A’zion, who’s carrying his child and gets sucked into his web of lies.
Josh Safdie, who co-wrote and co-edited the film with Ronald Bronstein, doesn’t belabor his ideas. He’s so busy entertaining you, as Marty ping-pongs from one catastrophe to the next, that you’d be forgiven for missing what’s percolating beneath the movie’s hyperkinetic surface.
Marty himself, the most incorrigible movie protagonist in many a moon, has already stirred much debate; many find his company insufferable and his actions indefensible. But the movies can be a wonderfully amoral medium, and I found myself liking Marty Mauser — and not just liking him, but actually rooting for him to succeed. It takes more than a good actor to pull that off. It takes one of the greats.
Hungarian director Béla Tarr at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011.
Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
Béla Tarr, the Hungarian arthouse director best known for his bleak, existential and challenging films, including Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies, has died at the age of 70. The Hungarian Filmmakers’ Association shared a statement on Tuesday announcing Tarr’s passing after a serious illness, but did not specify further details.
Tarr was born in communist-era Hungary in 1955 and made his filmmaking debut in 1979 with Family Nest, the first of nine feature films that would culminate in his 2011 film The Turin Horse. Damnation, released in 1988 at the Berlin International Film Festival, was his first film to draw global acclaim, and launched Tarr from a little-known director of social dramas to a fixture on the international film festival circuit.
Tarr’s reputation for films tinged with misery and hard-heartedness, distinguished by black-and-white cinematography and unusually long sequences, only grew throughout the 1990s and 2000s, particularly after his 1994 film Sátántangó. The epic drama, following a Hungarian village facing the fallout of communism, is best known for its length, clocking in at seven-and-a-half hours.
Based on the novel by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year and frequently collaborated with Tarr, the film became a touchstone for the “slow cinema” movement, with Tarr joining the ranks of directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman and Theo Angelopoulos. Writer and critic Susan Sontag hailed Sátántangó as “devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours.”
Tarr’s next breakthrough came in 2000 with his film Werckmeister Harmonies, the first of three movies co-directed by his partner, the editor Ágnes Hranitzky. Another loose adaptation of a Krasznahorkai novel, the film depicts the strange arrival of a circus in a small town in Hungary. With only 39 shots making up the film’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime, Tarr’s penchant for long takes was on full display.
Like Sátántangó, it was a major success with both critics and the arthouse crowd. Both films popularized Tarr’s style and drew the admiration of independent directors such as Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant, the latter of which cited Tarr as a direct influence on his films: “They get so much closer to the real rhythms of life that it is like seeing the birth of a new cinema. He is one of the few genuinely visionary filmmakers.”
The actress Tilda Swinton is another admirer of Tarr’s, and starred in the filmmaker’s 2007 film The Man from London. At the premiere, Tarr announced that his next film would be his last. That 2011 film, The Turin Horse, was typically bleak but with an apocalyptic twist, following a man and his daughter as they face the end of the world. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.
After the release of The Turin Horse, Tarr opened an international film program in 2013 called film.factory as part of the Sarajevo Film Academy. He led and taught in the school for four years, inviting various filmmakers and actors to teach workshops and mentor students, including Swinton, Van Sant, Jarmusch, Juliette Binoche and Gael García Bernal.
In the last years of his life, he worked on a number of artistic projects, including an exhibition at a film museum in Amsterdam. He remained politically outspoken throughout his life, condemning the rise of nationalism and criticizing the government of Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán.
East Cleveland City Schools celebrate ‘We are EC Day’ marking end of state oversight
Austin airport one step closer to major expansion that will add 32 new gates
Former Alabama OL starter transferring to SEC rival
National Native helpline for domestic violence and sexual assault to open Alaska-specific service
Arizona HS football’s No. 1 2027 prospect has ASU, Miami high on list
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Video: ‘It Didn’t Have to Happen This Way:’ U.Va. Faculty Call for Review of Police Response to Protests
San Diego sues to stop border barrier construction
How Ukraine is shaping Europe’s response to Trump’s Greenland threats
GOP gearing up to face tough midterms. And, Pentagon reviews women in ground combat
Wyoming Supreme Court rules laws restricting abortion violate state constitution
How strong are Latin America’s military forces, as they face US threats?
-
World1 week agoHamas builds new terror regime in Gaza, recruiting teens amid problematic election
-
News1 week agoFor those who help the poor, 2025 goes down as a year of chaos
-
Science1 week agoWe Asked for Environmental Fixes in Your State. You Sent In Thousands.
-
Business1 week agoA tale of two Ralphs — Lauren and the supermarket — shows the reality of a K-shaped economy
-
Detroit, MI4 days ago2 hospitalized after shooting on Lodge Freeway in Detroit
-
Politics1 week agoCommentary: America tried something new in 2025. It’s not going well
-
Politics1 week agoMarjorie Taylor Greene criticizes Trump’s meetings with Zelenskyy, Netanyahu: ‘Can we just do America?’
-
Health1 week agoRecord-breaking flu numbers reported in New York state, sparking warnings from officials