Without entering the realms of speculation about the medical history of the two individuals at the heart of the Paris olympics' women’s boxing debacle, there are some pertinent facts about the sport of boxing in general that people should bear in mind before deciding on which ideological hill to make a stand.
Women’s boxing was first introduced into the summer olympics in 2012. From 2016, professionals were allowed to enter and the same year the requirement for male boxers to wear padded head gear was removed on the grounds that padded headgear does not decrease concussion risk. However, women still have to wear it.
The weight and style of gloves are controlled. Female boxers must not be pregnant, and they are required to wear breast protection because getting punched in the breast is not only potentially very painful, especially during menstruation, it is potentially damaging to long term health.
Male boxers wear groin protection, and punches below the belt, or to the kidney region or back of the head are proscribed for both sexes.
The reason that women are still required to wear head gear may be more for face and ear protection than concerns about risk of concussion.
The human face is highly vulnerable to cuts and fractures even from a padded glove, and the female face typically lacks the stronger bone of such post-pubertal male features as the brow ridge and stronger jaw.
The sometimes permanently disfiguring effects of broken face bones, and damage to nasal and ear cartilage have greater social significance to women and very likely, the sort of facial harm that is routine in male boxing being done to women is not deemed a good look for the olympics.
Most importantly, the brain of both sexes is highly vulnerable to the effects of a blow to the head because the easily damaged brain bounces around inside the skull. If a fighter falls heavily onto their head, the effects may be worse still. The main reason the floor of the boxing ring is sprung and the posts are heavily padded is to reduce the risk of brain or spinal trauma from impacting them heavily.
If a boxer is dehydrated – a common factor in pre-fight measures to make the very strictly controlled weight grades – the damaging effects on the brain may be amplified.
Sometimes blows to the head result in obvious symptoms of mild concussion which, in boxing, could be a technical knock out; sometimes they result in a more severe concussion involving loss of consciousness – a literal knock out.
What is now known about concussion is that if you have even a mild one, you should avoid any further blows to the head as they are likely to exacerbate the damage to the delicate structures of the brain.
More serious brain damage can be catastrophic and from a single blow, or accumulative from repeated blows.
All contact sports involve the risk of forms and degrees of harm, but boxing is the only sport in which causing harm to your opponent's brain is not just permitted, if the damage is severe enough to result in a technical or a literal knock out, it's an automatic win.
The aim of delivering blows to the torso and arms in boxing are not just for the points that can be scored by hitting the target areas of head and torso, they are also to hurt and tire the opponent to make them drop their guard so that bout-winning blows to the head can be delivered.
The importance of all this to the current situation in women's olympic boxing is, if boxers competing in the female category happen to have a genetic condition which has resulted in full or partial virilisation at puberty, they will have all or part of the very significant average performance advantage (APA) that male boxers have over female boxers.
Part of that APA resides in a far greater punching power due, in large part, to the proportion of male body weight which is skeletal muscle and bone.
People who have gone through a male puberty will typically have a significantly greater proportion of their body weight in bone and skeletal muscle than people who have gone through female puberty. This means their body type is more effective both in delivering punches, and in absorbing them.
If that happened, it would not be fair, nor would it be safe.
There is no doubt in my mind that all these athletes are being used as pawns by forces engaged in a wider geo-political battle.
The hapless boxers who have been drawn into this debacle now include a young Russian whose name has been dredged up from the round of 16 in the 2023 world champs as “proof” that the “Russian-led IBA” banned Khelif in order to restore the Russian woman's unbeaten record.
This piece of mind-boggling post-hoc mendacity, which has appeared on Khelif’s Wikipedia page and widely via the western media, requires us to ignore all the preceding political shenanigans such as the US-led boycott of the IBA, the formation of World Boxing in opposition to the IBA, and the removal of IBA’s olympic accreditation etc.
It also requires us to completely ignore the other women of colour who Khelif beat to get to gold medal contention, and focus instead on a very young, very blonde Russian thus helping to stoke both Russophobia, and the ethnically-charged elements of the drama which are exemplified by an emotive post on X which claimed in relation to Carini, that “white women’s tears have ruined another brown woman’s life”.
I deplore the right's hysterical reaction which, by such despicable tactics as declaring Khelif to be a sexual predator, has descended en masse into the gutter where it is indulging in shameless Islamophobia.
On the other side, the west’s various useful idiots are focussing inordinate amounts of time and energy on supporting Khelif (Lin seems to be reduced to a supporting role), and on attacking “terfs”.
As a result, most are paying little or no attention to the Israeli team whose presence at the olympics was expected to be the focus of much comment and protests, given the Israeli government’s shameful and on-going actions in Gaza and more widely in the Middle East.
Go figure.
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