Everyone who listened to Thomas Bach’s speech at the Olympics closing ceremony rolled their eyes collectively. He described the Paris Games as “younger, more inclusive, more sustainable. The first Olympic Games with full gender parity.” What does that mean? Equal numbers of male and female athletes? Well, if you count certain men as women, I suppose.
After this disastrous oversight, which is shockingly disingenuous given the shadow cast by the gender conflict in boxing, he then made the world’s worst pun by saying that it was “Seine-sational Games”. Let’s forget for the moment that the Seine is full of E. coli.
But no one was there for the endless speeches. What matters now is how we proceed.
There have been some amazing moments in the last few weeks. Simone Biles performing superhuman feats. Armand Duplantis pole vaulting and that other well-endowed guy. The men’s 100m final. The tears of Andy Murray. The discovery of the brilliant skills of relatively new sports like BMX and skateboarding; the fascination of synchronized swimming. And my favorite, the crazy Australian “breakdancer” who had a bad run-up (and scored zero points).
There were also some less positive moments, however. The terrible whipping of the horses, the failed doping tests. But all of this was overshadowed by the gold medals won by Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, even though both had been deemed ineligible for the women’s category.
For this reason, we will remember Paris 2024 for a long time because it was the horrific sight of biologically male boxers beating women and stealing their medals.
The dispute continues, and more and more information is coming to light – now her coach Georges Cazorla has stated that the tests found “a problem with hormones” and “with chromosomes”. Therefore, the news that Thomas Bach is resigning from his position as President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is welcome.
But Bach is just one of many inadequate men, including lazy sports presenters and Mark Adams, an IOC spokesman (and friend of Keir Starmer), who talks absolute nonsense. Sometimes it seems that men only listen to other powerful men.
The intricacies of the dispute between the IOC and the Internal Boxing Association (IBA) may have escaped most people. Apparently in the name of “inclusion” (which, according to the IOC, should be the “standard criteria”), the IOC had overruled the results of the chromosome tests that had led the IBA to exclude these boxers.
The whole thing was apparently a conspiracy funded by the Russian state-owned company Gazprom (which admittedly made things even more complicated as a sponsor of the IBA). To prove you were female, all you needed was a women’s passport. No more invasive testing like in the bad old days! This is also complete nonsense when DNA can be obtained from a cheek swab and most female athletes have to provide regular urine samples anyway (or have pregnancy tests).
A few brave souls spoke up, initially in coded terms. Seb Coe said: “I was an administrator for the British Boxing Board of Control for five years and I have daughters. What do you think I think about this?”
Bach added to the confusion all the time by saying, “This is not a DSD (differences in sex development) case.” This then had to be corrected by saying that what he really meant to say was, “This is not a transgender case.”
This would almost be funny if it weren’t about punching women in the face. Or the integrity of women’s sport being questioned by these ill-informed men. Either they are ill-informed or they care so much about “inclusivity” that they throw any notion of fairness out the window.
None of these arguments are new; they are about the relevance of biology. Women who insist that biology is more important than gender identity (whatever that may be) have been pilloried for years. But the reasons why we insist are now clear. I hope the horrific images of those boxing matches – bloodied women, grinning men – stay with us.
Sportswomen like Sharron Davies and Martina Navratilova have campaigned to save women’s sport. The wonderful Dr Emma Hilton has explained without rancor what DSDs actually mean. Bodies fight bodies. Passes don’t fight passes and all sports categorise bodies by weight, ability and advantage. A woman is not a man with suppressed testosterone levels.
Coe has indicated that he will now run for the IOC presidency himself, saying: “I have a responsibility to preserve the women’s category. And I will continue to do so until a successor decides otherwise or the science changes.”
Hallelujah! There has been so much disinformation and refusal to understand what happened here.
Anyone who questions the gender of Khelif and Yu-Ting is accused of racism. But think back to the 2020 Olympics and weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who underwent gender reassignment surgery in her 30s.
I wrote at the time that Hubbard, who dropped out, had taken the place of 18-year-old Roviel Detenamo and that male puberty had given Hubbard an unfair advantage.
Nor is it about the idea of westernised femininity. Our powerlifters, shot putters and boxers look the way they do and that’s a good thing. I remember the abuse the great Fatima Whitbread received.
But finally men and women have put their heads out and said that things cannot go on like this. Thank you, Oliver Brown, especially in this newspaper.
We shouldn’t need Seb Coe to come to our rescue. But the fact is that we need people in all areas of public life who are prepared to say that sex matters. That shouldn’t be controversial!
The IOC has failed women. It has been weak, flabby and complacent in its ignorance and needs new leadership. Whoever it is needs ovaries of steel – or at least someone who recognizes that such things are important.
