Imane Khelif receiving a punch in a bout during Olympics 2024.© AFP
Irish ex-world champion Amy Broadhurst, who beat the Algerian boxer at the heart of an Olympics gender row, has defended her on social media and urged people to "stop the bullying." Broadhurst defeated Imane Khelif at the boxing World Championships in 2022, a year before the Algerian was disqualified by the International Boxing Federation after failing gender "eligibility criteria". "Personally I don't think she (Khelif) has done anything to 'cheat'," Broadhurst wrote on X. "I think it's the way she was born and that's out of her control."
She pointed out that Khelif had been beaten nine times in the past by other women which "says it all".
Khelif, 25, has become embroiled in a heated global gender row after causing her Italian opponent on Thursday to retire hurt during a last-16 bout at the Paris Olympics after just 46 seconds.
"There's an awful lot of abuse going online. We are in very close contract with the athletes and their entourages," Mark Adams, spokesman for the International Olympic Committee, told reporters on Friday.
He said Khelif was being "stigmatised and potentially forced out of a competition."
Harry Potter author and feminist J.K Rowling branded the Algerian a "bullying cheat" in a social media post, while Donald Trump's Republican running mate JD Vance described the bout as a "grown man pummelling a woman."
British boxer Nicola Adams, who won gold in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, also criticised the IOC's decision to allow Khelif to compete as a woman.
"After years of fighting for women's boxing to even exist in the Olympics and then all the training they go through to get there, it was hard to watch another fighter be forced to give up on her Olympic dreams," she wrote on X.
"People not born as biological women, that have been through male puberty, should not be able to compete in women's sport. Not only is this unfair it's dangerous!"
Broadhurst urged observers to remember that "nothing has been confirmed that this person is male."
The International Boxing Association has not specified what tests were done on Khelif and Taiwan's Lin Yu Ting who was also disqualified in 2023 after failing to meet gender eligibility criteria at the world championships in New Delhi.
The IOC, which is in open conflict with the Russian-led International Boxing Association after expelling it from the Olympic movement, has dismissed the tests as "arbitrary" and "cobbled together."
It is allowing women to compete at the Paris Olympics boxing providing they are identified as women in their identity documents.
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