Khelif withdrew from competitions, as boxing buffs want the IOC to take away her gold medal

Algerian Olympic champion boxer Imane Khelif, who is at the centre of a row over gender eligibility, will not compete in this week's tournament in the Netherlands, organisers said Thursday.

Dirk Renders, spokesman for the Eindhoven Box Cup, confirmed to AFP the boxer would not be taking part, adding: "The decision of her exclusion is up to World Boxing."

World Boxing has introduced mandatory gender testing for competitors over 18 and has informed the Algerian federation that Khelif would have to undergo the test to compete in Eindhoven this week.

Under the new policy, all athletes in World Boxing-sanctioned competitions need to take a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test to determine their sex they were at birth.

The PCR test, conducted via a nasal or mouth swab, detects specific genetic material -- in this case, the SRY gene -- that reveals the presence of the Y chromosome, an indicator of biological gender.

The controversy around Khelif, who won Gold in the women's welterweight class in Paris, was one of the stories of the Games.

The scandal erupted when Khelif defeated Italy's Angela Carini in 46 seconds in her opening bout, the Italian reduced to tears after suffering a badly hurt nose.

Khelif and Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting, then found themselves at the centre of a gender row that attracted comments from US President Donald Trump and "Harry Potter" author J.K.Rowling.

Both boxers had been disqualified from the International Boxing Association's (IBA) 2023 world championships after the organisation said they had failed gender eligibility tests.

But the International Olympic Committee later stripped the IBA of its right to organise boxing in Paris over financial, governance, and ethical concerns.

The IOC allowed them both to compete in Paris, saying they had been victims of "a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA".

"The two female athletes mentioned by the IBA are not transgender athletes," the IOC said in a statement to AFP in February.

"They were born as women, were raised as women, and have competed in the women's category for their entire boxing careers," said the IOC.

World Boxing will organise the boxing competition at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics after the IOC granted it provisional recognition.

Khelif is a role model to many in Algeria and received strong support from authorities and fans during the controversy in Paris.

After winning Gold, she said the medal was the best response to her critics.

"I am fully qualified to take part. I am a woman like any other. I was born a woman, lived a woman and competed as a woman," she said.

The row rumbled on well beyond Paris, with the IBA saying in February it would sue the IOC for clearing Khelif to box at the Games.

Khelif jabbed back that the accusations were "false and offensive", adding: "This is a matter that concerns not just me but the broader principles of fairness and due process in sport."

She has vowed to take her legal action to refute the accusations.

"I am not going anywhere. I will fight in the ring, I will fight in the courts, and I will fight in the public eye until the truth is undeniable," she said.

World Boxing, which took over governance of the sport from the IBA, was forced into an embarrassing climbdown of its own earlier this week.

It had initially been named Khelif in its statement announcing the new testing policy, but then rowed back.

"The president of World Boxing does not think it was correct to have named a specific athlete" in the statement.

The association wrote to the Algerian boxing authorities to apologise and acknowledge that "greater effort should have been made to avoid linking the policy to any individual".

Meanwhile, there are calls for the IOC to revoke Khelif’s medal: “Khelif’s gold medal should be revoked,” the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, or ICONS, said in a Thursday statement. “Female athletes were deceived; the IOC and the Algerian Boxing Federation both knew that Khelif was male.”

The organisation called it an “egregious violation of the principles of sport. A man beating up women in a boxing ring is nothing to celebrate. It should be condemned from every corner of the globe.”

Linda Blade, a former Canadian track athletics coach who has trained Olympic athletes, called for the IOC to apologise to the 2024 field of boxers, acknowledge that IOC officials knew Khelif had the male karyotype, and recover the medals.

“The IOC should claim back the gold medals won by both Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, rescinding those results from the official Olympic Games archive, to be reinstated upon proof they are female via independent medical verification – undertaken outside their country of citizenship,” said Blade, author of the book “Unsporting: How trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport.”