Bounding into the ring, to a rousing chorus of ‘Volare’ from the large Italian contingent in the 5,000 crowd, Angela Carini looked every inch a woman.
Her luxuriant raven hair, which she wears loose when not on duty as police officer in Naples, was wrapped in a blue bandana. Her tight chest-guard and baggy blue shorts couldn’t conceal her feminine curves.
As her corner assistant fastened on the gloves, she might have been thinking of her father, who inspired her take up boxing but died a few days after she made her Olympic debut at the Tokyo Games three years ago.
After 107 bouts, of which she has won 84, 25-year-old Carini is nobody’s pushover. Not for nothing is she nicknamed ‘Tiger’.
Heaven knows what dark thoughts ran through her mind, though, when she gazed at the red-kitted person in the corner diagonally opposite her, who was clearly pumped up and making ready.
I use the word ‘person’ advisedly.
For although the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in their dubious wisdom, are satisfied that Imane Khelif is female, her coat-hanger shoulders, bulging biceps and lantern jaw (augmented by a haircut resembling that of late popstar Prince) screamed masculinity.
Carini would surely have known all about Khelif’s genetic make-up, which meant she was likely to have 75 per cent more muscle-mass in her upper body and 90 per cent more strength.
The Italian may also have been aware of scientific research into the sexual dimorphism (or physical differences) between men and women, which proves that the average male can punch two and a half times harder than a female.
And when studying Khelif’s boxing tactics, Carini must have watched the now-viral video showing the 5ft 9in, 10st 5lb Algerian brutalising a smaller and weaker Mexican woman into submission in a relentless onslaught two years ago.
Internet comments have likened it to a case of domestic violence.
Yesterday’s hapless victim barely had time to soak up the electric atmosphere in the North Paris Arena before the first sledgehammer blow hit home. A right-hander that might have been delivered by Mike Tyson, Khelif’s punch struck Carini’s head so forcefully that it dislodged her blue leather head guard — equipment that supposedly protects Olympic boxers and makes their sport safe.
From my seat overlooking the ring, I winced and took in a sharp breath as I saw this opening shot find its target.
Though Carini asked the referee for a time-out so that the guard could be readjusted, and seemed ready to continue, it was obvious even then that she wouldn’t last much longer. A young woman IOC official was sitting next to me, so I asked her what she thought of the gruesome mismatch in size and strength. ‘Sorry, we aren’t allowed to have an opinion,’ she replied, poker-faced.
Moments later, words were redundant. Another sickening punch, even more powerful than the first, clubbed Carini flush on the nose, rocking her head back violently, as if she were a rag doll.
After just 46 seconds, mercifully, it was over.
Wiping away the blood, which mingled with her tears, Carini sank to her knees in the middle of ring, showing her anguish by hammering her fists into the canvass.
‘It’s not fair,’ she mouthed to her corner, a sentiment doubtless shared by many fans in the packed arena.
At first, however, confusion reigned. Had she thrown in the towel because she was too badly hurt to continue? Did she surrender for fear of further punishment?
Or was she staging a protest, perhaps pre-planned, against her opponent’s disputed gender? The official result, as delivered by the five judges, was that she had ‘abandoned’ the fight. Yet as Khelif raised a triumphal arm and Carini slipped away, refusing to accept the Algerian’s offer of a conciliatory handshake — an amateur boxing ritual that very seldom goes unobserved — it was evident that something momentous had happened here.
We had witnessed one of the most egregious — and dangerous — contests since the Olympics were staged in the amphitheatres of ancient Greece and Rome and combatants sometimes fought to the death.
It was an act of folly that not only discredited the IOC — who ought to have foreseen how it could end — but undermined the very spirit of the Olympic movement.
By my reckoning, the organisers of Paris 2024 should take some blame, too.
For as Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini said before yesterday’s debacle, this whole garish spectacle reeked of ‘political correctness’ and ‘woke ideology’.
Diversity and inclusion have been the twin mantras of these Games from the outset. The obsession with these holy grail virtues has underpinned every facet, right down to the ludicrous insistence on ensuring there are exactly the same number of males and females among the 11,400 athletes (though after yesterday, we are entitled to wonder if there is one fewer woman and one more man).
So, we must assume that the quest for ‘inclusion’ was behind the IOC’s decision to sanction Khelif’s entry, and also that of Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting, even though both were disqualified from last year’s world women’s boxing championships after tests showed their excessive testosterone levels.
Mr Salvini describes the ruling to allow Khelif as ‘a slap in the face for the ethics of the sport and to the credibility of the Olympics’ — comments which have made him the subject of threats and insults.
From the outpouring of anger that this controversy has stirred on the internet, however, it is evident that huge numbers of sensible people share his views, among them the only people who know how it feels to be hit in the face by a physically superior human being: the boxers themselves.
Critics of the IOC decision range from former world featherweight champion Barry McGuigan to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who decried Khelif and Yu-Ting as ‘two men masquerading as women’.
Condemnation also comes from author JK Rowling, who yesterday posed an image of Khelif attempting to comfort the emotionally and physically broken Carini, and commented: ‘Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better?’
In fairness, Khelif has an uplifting back story. She became interested in boxing after watching the Rio 2016 Olympic Games and paid the bus fare from her small village to the nearest boxing gym by selling bits of scrap metal for recycling. Her mother also helped her by selling couscous. This year she was a named a UNICEF ambassador for Algeria.
Khelif, who ironically represents the Civil Safety Boxing Club in her hometown of Tiaret and lists her hobby as ‘cooking’, only took up boxing in 2020. Muhammad Ali is her hero.
She lost five of her early fights, but progressed so rapidly that, last March, she reached the final of the world championships in India. But she was disqualified before the gold medal bout with a Chinese boxer. Yu-Ting, who is due to fight today was stripped of the bronze medal she had secured.
After she was disqualified last year, Khelif claimed to have been the victim of a high-level ‘conspiracy’ orchestrated inside and outside her country but didn’t say who she believed was behind it.
The International Boxing Federation, who then controlled the sport, said a DNA test showed them both to have X and Y chromosomes, which made them biological men. Women typically have XX chromosomes. The boxer’s testosterone levels were said to be equivalent to those found in men. The IBA’s president Umar Kremlev claimed they had been ‘trying to deceive their colleagues and pretended to be women.’
It must be pointed out that Kremlev, a Russian sports tsar with close ties to Vladimir Putin, produced no evidence to support his allegation of deliberate deception.
And also that the IBA, funded solely by the Russian energy giant Gazprom, lost control of Olympic boxing after concerns were raised over its governance, finance and ethics.
Boxing at the Paris Games thus comes under the auspices of the IOC’s new boxing unit. Before Khelif fought yesterday, I put a series of questions to this unit, asking precisely how it had established her female gender and that of Yu-Ting.
An IOC spokesman responded that all Olympic athletes ‘comply with the competition’s entry, as well as all applicable medical regulations,’ but did not explain how their complicity had been proved. We have, of course, been here before, notably with the South African Olympic gold medalist Caster Semenya.
She was belatedly required to take a testosterone suppressant before competing after being found to have been born with a congenital intersex condition that raises her levels.
Semenya challenged the decision and though she has retired from athletics her protracted case is still going through the courts.
Yet the worst that could happen to Semenya’s rivals was that they would be left trailing in her turbo-charged wake.
Had Angela Carini hung around much longer yesterday, she might have been killed.
After despatching her, a gleeful Khelif brushed away press questions about the legitimacy of her entry and whooped: ‘I’m here to win gold! I will fight anybody!’
Meanwhile, with her hands still bandaged in the bloodied wraps boxers wear under their gloves, Carini wept again as she strove to explain why she had quit.
After preparing for the Olympics for four years, only to succumb to just two punches, she could have been forgiven for ascribing her defeat to the inequality of the contest. Admirably, she chose not to do so. Asked whether she felt she had been beaten by a man, she replied: ‘It’s not up to me to judge. It’s not up to me to say if it’s fair or not fair. I just did my job. I managed to leave with my head held high.’
Pressed on the matter, she added that she ‘hadn’t been interested in the person in front of me’. She had simply come to fight and honour her father’s memory, but Khelif’s blow had ‘hurt too much’.
‘After the second punch I felt a strong pain in the nose. I said enough because I couldn’t finish the fight. It was better to put an end to it,’ she said.
‘I am in pieces because I am a fighter. They taught me to be a warrior. I’ve always tried to behave with honour… to represent my country with loyalty. This time I couldn’t manage to because I couldn’t fight any more.’
Her coach, Emanuelle Renzini revealed he had tried to coax her into completing the first of the three, three-minute rounds, at least, but she had refused.
From where I had been sitting, it looked a very wise decision.
Next in the firing line is Anna Luca Hamori, a 23-year-old Hungarian with flowing blonde hair who recently posted beside a swimming pool in a pink bikini.
After what I saw yesterday, I am praying for her.