Italian boxer apologizes amid Olympics gender controversy

Angela Carini, the Italian boxer who abandoned her Olympic bout Wednesday against Algeria’s Imane Khelif in less than a minute, offered a public apology Friday to Khelif for her post-fight behavior, which helped fuel conspiracy theories about Khelif’s gender and stoked right-wing outrage over transgender athletes in competitive sports. 

Carini refused to shake Khelif’s hand following Wednesday’s match and sank to her knees in tears. She later told reporters she ended the fight because of severe pain in her nose. 

Carini emphasized, however, that she was not making a political statement in abandoning the fight, and she is not qualified to decide whether Khelif should be allowed to compete. 

The 25-year-old’s reaction to her opponent’s win helped ignite a firestorm over Khelif’s gender identity, which conservative pundits, media personalities and lawmakers had already questioned because of resurfaced reports that Khelif and another Olympic boxer, Lin Yu‑ting of Taiwan, failed to meet an unspecified gender eligibility requirement at last year’s Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi. 

Former President Trump, responding to the backlash, posted a video of the fight to Truth Social, his social media site. “I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!” he wrote. 

Neither Khelif, 25, nor Lin, 28, who won her fight against Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova on Friday, identify as transgender. Both athletes competed in the women’s category at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo with little to no controversy. 

On Friday, Carini said she regrets not shaking Khalif’s hand and that if she saw her again, she would “embrace” her. 

“It wasn’t something I intended to do,” Carini told La Gazzetta dello Sport, an Italian newspaper. “Actually, I want to apologize to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke.” 

“All this controversy makes me sad,” she said. Khelif, who is set to face Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori in Saturday’s quarterfinals, has not issued a public statement on the backlash. 

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) in a Thursday statement said all athletes participating in the boxing tournament at this year’s Paris Games comply with the competition’s eligibility and entry regulations. “As with previous Olympic boxing competitions, the gender and age of the athletes are based on their passport,” the organization said. 

During a Friday press conference, IOC spokesperson Mark Adams questioned the validity of gender testing — which the IOC banned from this year’s Games — given to Khelif and Lin at last year’s World Boxing Championships by the International Boxing Association. 

“We have no knowledge of what the tests were,” Adams said, the Washington Post reported. “They were cobbled together, as I understand, overnight to change the results [of the World Boxing Championships].”