Controversy They Didn't Create

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Aug. 10, 2024

There is no such thing as an Olympics without controversy, and it usually starts outside the arena of competition…though not always.

In the past, we have had significant doping scandals when old Soviet Bloc countries, particularly East Germany, ran full-blown, state-sponsored cheating operations that started with athletically-promising children as young as five or six shipped off to “performance academies” where their “vitamins” included a regimen of illegal performance enhancing drugs and others to mask the presence of the enhancers.

Russia and China were still cheating as late as four years ago, resulting in some of their athletes being banned from both Olympic and other international competitions.

The Olympics are a little bit different. Their governing body, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has been previously beset by accusations of corruption, including bribery in determining future Olympic sites. They allowed some Russian athletes to participate both four years ago and this year but not under the Russian flag. Chinese athletes tested positive for banned substances in meets leading up to the Paris Olympics but were allowed to participate anyway. The IOC, in so many words, said they were sure those athletes had stopped cheating.

We’ve also seen bizarre judge decisions in previous Olympics, including a video of a boxing judge being handed an envelope full of cash during the Seoul Olympics. And there is always controversy judging gymnastics, boxing, judo, and figure skating because most of us have no clue what the criteria are and the announcers are busier hoping to interview a celebrity than they are explaining why that score was two-tenths lower than the previous score.

This year we have a different controversy altogether involving women boxers and an American runner, an artificially created controversy perpetuated ad nauseam by the always-vigilant culture warriors.

Two women, Imane Khelif from Algeria and Lin Yu-ting who represents Chinese Taipei, have both been accused of—at least it has been strongly suggested—being transgender men masquerading as women and pummeling their opponents.

Though both have been fighting for years, they were banned this year from the World Boxing Championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA) which claimed they had both failed gender identification blood tests which showed XY chromosomes. Pretty conclusive, except the IBA refused to not only share the test results but also didn’t even share what tests had been administered. They were primarily funded by a Russian company that also sponsored several boxers, and the IBA has subsequently been stripped of their authority over amateur boxing.

So Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting were banned by a corrupt and no longer existing organization based on secret tests with secret results that directly benefited boxers from another country. Yikes.

Despite all the outraged yammering from the talking head community, reality is a little different. Both Khelif and Lin have birth certificates that list them as female, they have always identified as female, and both have been boxing as females for years. They were tested prior to the Olympics and found to have no XY chromosomes and no excessive levels of testosterone or human growth hormone or any banned substance. They test as women because that’s what they are.

Though they are highly ranked amateurs and may have won an Olympic medal by the time this is published, they aren’t unbeatable monsters beating up outmatched women. Lin has lost 14 times in her career, Khelif has tasted defeat nine times, and all the losses of both women were to other women.

There were 193 athletes at this year’s Olympics who openly identified as LGBTQ+. There are likely more, but openly coming out is still extremely high risk in some countries and in some parts of the U.S.

Only one athlete openly identified as transgender, and it demonstrates how complicated all of this has now become.

Nikki Hiltz, the American 1500 meter runner, self-identifies as “transgender non-binary.” She has been accused of having been born a male, the stereotypical male-now-dominating-as-female. In fact, Hiltz was born female, is listed as female on her birth certificate, and has always competed as a female, as she did in the Olympics. She says she has known she wanted to be male since she was very young but she has not, however, undertaken any of the physical steps needed to make that transition; no surgery or drugs, and she can continue to legitimately compete as a woman.

It is not clear when it became necessary for some, especially social media misinformation peddlers, to keep creating more and more labels defining smaller and smaller silos that mostly create more walls, and problems, between us.

Imane Khelif, Lin Yu-ting, and Nikki Hiltz were just Olympic athletes trying to do their best despite the insulting controversy surrounding them they did not create. They should have been cheered.