“Extraordinary, chaotic and shambolic”. The IBA’s press conference transcended into chaos on Monday as the organisation attempted to outline its position on the ongoing eligibility row within Olympic boxing.
The row centres around the participation of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting. Both have been allowed to take part in the Olympics, with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) adopting different criteria to the International Boxing Association (IBA) who disqualified both from last year’s World Championships due to the results of an unspecified eligibility test.
On Monday, Imane Khelif called for an end to “bullying” after she guaranteed herself an Olympic medal. IOC president Thomas Bach insisted on Saturday there was “never any doubt” that Khelif and Yu-ting are women.
The IBA is not currently recognised as the international federation for boxing by the IOC. An IBA appeal to this decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport was dismissed in April. Sky Sports senior reporter Geraint Hughes, who attended the press conference on Monday, gave an eyewitness account of how it unfolded…
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It was the most extraordinary, chaotic, shambolic and badly organised international sporting press conference I have ever attended.
It started an hour late and contained numerous technical glitches. Throughout the press conference, people were shouting over questions and shouting over answers. Several journalists and other people who were attending left in disgust, at not just the language, but the tone of the answers from the IBA participants; in the main from the president Umar Kremlev, who was speaking virtually in Russian.
He interjected often and made slanderous remarks about the IOC President Thomas Bach.
He interjected several times to comment on the portrayal of Christianity during the opening ceremony, which added to the sort of farcical, shambolic nature of the press conference when there were meant to be questions between the floor and people on the top table – Chris Roberts, the General Secretary of the IBA, a doctor and Gabriel Martelli, who is an IBA executive when it comes to the coaching committee.
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Kremlev was interjecting over those members of the panel, claiming he is the defender of women in sport and that he is trying to save women’s sport while he continued his attack on the IOC president Bach.
The conference was utterly farcical, because at times the translation was missing or was poor and slow, meaning people didn’t actually know what was being said. It was an extraordinarily hard occasion to listen to.
We were invited to attend by the IBA, which is a banned organisation by the IOC. It cannot organise the Olympic boxing contest here in Paris, nor in Tokyo. That decision has been legally backed up in the courts.
The IBA said today it was going to offer a detailed explanation of why Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting had been banned from boxing at the IBA World Championships in Delhi in 2023. Nobody in that room got anything of the sort. We were told there were two blood tests taken in Istanbul in 2022 and Delhi in 2023.
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But we were not given any information on what those tests were. We don’t know. We have no idea what the results of those tests were. We were just led with one sentence where it said: ‘we’ll leave you to make up your own mind’. Well, that’s not fact.
The only thing they said they have proof of, or they’re prepared to give proof of, is that tests were taken and those results came from laboratories in Istanbul and Delhi. But as I say, we have no verifiable information of what those tests were. And even if we did, we have no verifiable evidence of what those tests show.
So, a detailed explanation of why Khelif and Yu-Ting were barred from competing in the world championships was not presented today. The conference has just added to the confusion.
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I think the feeling after one of the most chaotic, shambolic press conferences I can ever recall, has resulted in the IBA’s reputation being damaged even further, beyond CAS’s ruling that it cannot organise a boxing competition in the Olympics.
Towards the end of the press conference it became evident that two members of the Algerian Olympic delegation, two women, had made it into the room. They began demonstrating. They removed some outer garments of their clothing, a jacket, and revealed they were wearing Algerian tops. They were waving a flag.
It turned out one of them is a boxer here at the Olympics [Roumaysa Boualam]. She is in the 50-kilogram category and is Khelif’s best friend. She spoke passionately about Khelif being a girl at birth, registered as a girl, growing up as a girl and growing up as a woman, how she is absolutely entitled to be boxing in Paris and that she is a hero and a champion.
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From my point of view, in my 28-year journalism career, both at Sky and previously with the BBC, I have attended some strange things, but I have never been at a press conference like that. It was absolutely extraordinary.
