Imane Khelif was just a couple of months old when JK Rowling published The Prisoner of Azkaban, the third book in her Harry Potter series, in July 1999.
While children across the world queued up to get their hands on copies of the latest instalment of the boy wizard’s adventures, Khelif was embarking on what she would later describe as her own fairytale, one which would take her from a childhood selling scrap metal and plastic in a backwater town in rural Algeria to Olympic glory in Paris.
At first glance, then, a real rags-to-riches tale and yet one which underwent an extraordinary twist this week when the 25-year-old Algerian named Rowling in a criminal complaint filed to French authorities after the world-famous author accused the boxer of being male.
Indeed, nearly a week after the Olympic closing ceremony in Paris, the ugly gender row which overshadowed the games amid allegations that Khelif is ‘biologically’ male is showing no sign of abating.
With Rowling, billionaire Elon Musk and possibly even Donald Trump drawn into the legal affray, if anything the gloves are only just coming off.
Among those outraged by claims that Khelif is a ‘man fighting woman’ are, the Mail can exclusively reveal, the boxer’s mother, Nasria, who has spoken out for the first time about the controversy this week, insisting that her child is her ‘beloved daughter’.
She vowed to give her ‘unwavering love and support as I have always done since she was born’, adding: ‘I will always be there for her.’ Family friends have told this newspaper that despite initially having reservations about Imane competing in a sport largely associated with men, Nasria Khelif eventually threw her weight behind her, taking on extra work as a school cook to help pay for her daughter’s boxing training and travel costs.
‘Nasria has been at Imane’s side throughout her career,’ said one of the Khelif family’s neighbours in Biban Mesbah in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, around 185 miles from the Algerian capital, Algiers.
Both Nasria and her husband Amar, who works as a welder for an oil company, were among hundreds of locals who crowded around a giant outdoor screen in the centre of Biban Mesbah, a town with a population of just 6,000, tucking into plates of couscous while watching their daughter punch her way to Olympic victory in Paris last Friday.
Celebratory shots were fired into the air from traditional muskets after Khelif’s welterweight win over China’s Yang Lui.
Nasria and Amar were with Imane at the Palais d’El Mouradia in Algiers on Thursday where their boxer daughter was given a hero’s welcome by President Abdelmajid Tebboune who told her: ‘Your gold is Algeria’s gold.’
The ceremony is just one of many high-profile celebrations planned in Khelif’s highly conservative and nationalistic home country in the days ahead.
For Algerians, Khelif’s Olympic gold medal is a source of huge national pride. Amar Khelif – who insisted a fortnight ago: ‘My child is a girl. She was raised as a girl. Imane is a girl who has loved sport since she was six years old’ – has also described Imane’s medal as ‘Algeria’s victory’.
A giant poster of his daughter hangs on the wall at her old boxing club in the town of Tiaret. Zohra Chourouk, a 17-year-old member of the club, says she hope to follow in Imane’s footsteps.
She added: ‘She honoured the national flag. She is our role model.’
Such praise is a world away from comments made by JK Rowling as the gender row centred on Khelif gathered pace in Paris.
The 59-year-old mother of three was one of the most high-profile figures leading the outcry against Khelif’s inclusion in this summer’s Games after it emerged the athlete failed unspecified gender eligibility tests administered by the International Boxing Association.
In one post on X, Rowling shared a photo of Khelif’s controversial fight with Italy’s Angela Carini, which lasted just 46 seconds before Carini abandoned the fight, accusing the Algerian of being a male who was ‘enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head’.
In another post, she wrote: ‘Explain why you’re OK with a man beating a woman in public for your entertainment. This isn’t sport. From the bullying cheat in the red all the way up to the organisers who allowed this to happen, this is men revelling in their power over women.’
X owner Elon Musk also weighed in, sharing a post from US swimmer Riley Gaines which said that ‘men don’t belong in women’s sports’ and adding the word ‘absolutely’.
US presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump posted a picture from one of Khelif’s fights and said: ‘I will keep men out of women’s sports.’
Such comments have outraged Algerians – particularly those who have known Khelif since childhood – and have led to erroneous claims that she was a trans woman; claims which were swiftly debunked by the emergence of photographs taken in the early 2000s showing Khelif as a schoolgirl in a class photograph at primary school in Biban Mesbah.
Khelif was born in the small town of Aïn Sidi Ali, in May 1999, the youngest of five children. Her family moved to Biban Mesbah a few years later. Neighbours recall how she was expected to help her mother with household chores but also developed a passion for football with boys in the village. On occasions, she also got into fights with them.
One of her teachers – who has no doubt the child who attended her primary school class was a girl – told the Mail this week that she was ‘energetic and very ambitious’.
‘She wanted to be the best at what she did, and to make other people in her home country proud of her. Football was her first passion then she was drawn to boxing, even though her parents didn’t think that sport was right for a little girl.
‘Boys gave her a tough time, too, and she had to stand up to them, but this made her more determined.’
In an interview with UNICEF, for whom Khelif became an ambassador in January, she said she used to sell scrap metal and plastic, while her mother sold home-made couscous, to pay for the bus fare to the nearest club ten miles away.
She became a cadet in Algeria’s Civil Protection Unit which enabled her to attend their boxing club in Tiaret. She moved to the town to live with her Uncle Rachid.
She is said to have begun training seriously after watching boxing on television at the Rio 2016 Olympics. The roots of this highly toxic controversy lie in the last-minute decision by the International Boxing Association (IBA) in March last year, to disqualify Khelif from the Women’s World Championships in India.
She was expelled just hours before a scheduled gold medal showdown against a Chinese opponent ‘after her elevated levels of testosterone failed to meet the eligibility criteria’. So, too, was Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting. In a statement this month, the IBA said that the pair had failed to meet the eligibility for participating in the women’s competition.
It said that the boxers ‘did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognised test where the specifics remain confidential’.
The IBA’s Russian president, Umar Kremlev, alleged last year that both boxers’ tests revealed the presence of XY chromosomes which determine a person’s biological sex as male.
To complicate matters further, however, the Russian-dominated IBA has been seriously discredited in recent years amid concerns about the integrity of its president, Kremlev, who is a close associate of Vladimir Putin, as well as an ongoing clash with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) which banished the organisation from the Olympics in 2019.
The IOC has already said boxing will be dropped from the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics unless the sport lines up behind a new governing body. Amid accusations of corruption, judging scandals and financial misdeeds, three dozen nations, including the UK and the US, have cuts ties with the IBA to form a new body called World Boxing.
Tensions between the IBA and the IOC increased following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While the IOC advised its governing bodies to prevent Russian athletes competing with their national flag and anthems, the IBA disregarded this at the world championships in Delhi last year.
Aspects of Khelif’s disqualification are deeply troubling, particularly the timing. It came just three days after the Algerian, who had competed for years in IBA events without any problems, won an early-round bout with Azalia Amineva, a previously unbeaten Russian fighter.
Khelif’s disqualification ensured Amineva’s official perfect record was restored. Not surprisingly then, the IOC – and others in the boxing world – believe Khelif’s IBA disqualification lacks transparency and cannot be relied upon.
An IOC statement made clear the organisation’s stance: ‘Khelif was assigned female at birth and it says so on her passport, which is the International Olympic Committee’s threshold for eligibility in boxing.’ Nevertheless, she faced a wave of online abuse and accusations over her gender.
In the middle of the Paris Games, Khelif’s trainer, George Cazorla, tried to put the scandal to rest with a statement which raised as many questions as it answered.
He said that after the 2023 World Championships disqualification, he contacted a renowned endocrinologist, a doctor who treats hormone related problems, in Paris.
‘He confirmed that Imane is indeed a woman, despite her karyotype [an individual’s set of chromosones] and her testosterone level. He said: ‘There is a problem with her hormones, with her chromosome, but she is a woman.
‘We then worked with a doctor based in Algeria to monitor and regulate Imane’s testosterone level, which is currently within the female norm. Tests clearly show that all her muscular and other qualities have been diminishing since then.’
Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns for the UK charity Sex Matters and an expert on the policies of sports governing bodies, said that both Khelif and Taiwan’s Yu-Ting are believed to to be impacted by what is known medically as a Difference of Sexual Development (DSD) which gave them ‘a massive competitive advantage’.
According to the NHS, DSD is ‘a group of rare conditions involving genes and reproductive organs, including genitals. It means a person’s sex development is different to most other people’s’. Around 130 babies born in the UK each year have potential intersex conditions and, it is estimated, around 1.7 per cent of the global population.
At Rio 2016, all three athletes on the podium for the women’s 800m race – South Africa’s Caster Semenya, Margaret Wambui of Kenya and Burundi’s Francine Niyonsaba – had DSD.
Sex Matters trustee Dr Emma Hilton, a developmental scientist at the University of Manchester and an expert in how differences between the sexes translate into sporting performance, told the Mail: ‘That 800m race was shocking, but at least when you are running around a track you are not punching someone in the face.
‘The IOC don’t want these athletes barred because they have been captured by ideology. They have said that this is a human rights issue where to do so would be discrimination. But inclusion cannot just be offset against safety.’
Khelif is adamant that that nothing about her biology has given her an advantage in the boxing ring.
Speaking after her gold medal victory last Friday, she said: ‘I’m a strong woman with special powers. From the ring, I sent a message to those who were against me.’
Her French lawyer has confirmed that a legal complaint has been sent to the National Centre for the Fight Against Online Hatred within the Paris Prosecutor’s Office accusing individuals, including Rowling, of ‘cyberbullying due to gender’. An investigation has been launched.
In the midst of this ongoing debacle, perhaps the most troubling comment of all came from IOC President Thomas Bach last Friday when he said that there is not a ‘scientifically solid system’ to identify men and women.
Until that issue is resolved, the debate about how to ensure a level playing field for athletes is unlikely to be settled in the near future.