Mark Zeigler: Sport’s gender gray area comes to Olympic women’s boxing

The night before Angela Carini’s opening bout in the women’s boxing competition at the Tokyo Olympics, her father died.

The Italian from Naples lost the next day and soon quit the sport. Last fall, she had a change of heart and returned to the ring, qualifying for the Olympics and climbing through the ropes Thursday at Paris North Arena for her opening bout in the 145-pound division. She pointed skyward to her father.

Carini touched gloves with Algeria’s Imane Khelif and the bell sounded. Khelif landed a punch on Carini’s nose, and Carini quickly raised her glove to halt the fight and went to her corner, presumably so her chinstrap could be adjusted.

She returned to the middle of the ring, and Khelif hit her again.

Carini walked back to her corner. And quit.

“It’s not right,” TV microphones reportedly caught her saying in Italian as she left the ring after 46 seconds.

Carini was wearing blue with white shoes and lime green socks. Khelif was in all red.

But this wasn’t about vibrant colors.

This is the great gray area of women’s sports, the growing pain just as they are poking their head above the clouds of global consciousness, the unsolved conundrum that Carini reminded us isn’t going away, the elephant in the locker room.

Last year at boxing’s World Championships in India, Khelif was hours away from fighting for the championship when organizers disqualified her and stripped Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting of her bronze medal. The reason: They had failed a gender eligibility test and, in the words of International Boxing Association President Umar Kremlev, “tried to deceive their colleagues and pretend to be women.”

The IBA isn’t overseeing the competition in Paris, as international federations typically do. The International Olympic Committee is after decertifying the Russian-run IBA amid allegations of corruption and mismanagement.

The IOC operates with different, less stringent gender eligibility rules. Khelif and Lin are free to compete in Paris.

Carini drew Khelif in her opening bout, and immediately pressure began mounting back home – including from high-ranking government officials – to forfeit in protest. She took a more nuanced approach, starting the three-round fight and abandoning after 46 seconds while Olympic cameras were rolling but refusing to pass judgment on Khelif in a tearful interview.

“I’m a mature athlete,” Carini kept saying in Italian. “I know when it’s time to stop.”

Her coach, Emanuela Renzini, said he convinced her to continue after she first came to the ropes following Khelif’s first punch, suggesting they wait for the one-minute break between rounds to talk it through. Ten seconds later, she was back.

Said Renzini: “She told me, ‘I don’t want to fight anymore. I feel big pain in my nose. She’s too strong for me.’ Many people said before, ‘Don’t go, don’t go, she’s a man, it’s dangerous for you.’ Maybe it’s this.”

Neither made disparaging remarks about Khelif or whether the Algerian should be in Paris.

“I don’t want to say anything about it,” Renzini said in English. “This is a big question, and I don’t have the title. I’m a trainer, I do boxing, I come (to the competition), and I stop. This is a political thing. It’s not for me. It’s a very difficult question.”

It is.

But it is a question that the international sports community needs to answer. Lin’s first bout in the 125-pound weight class, against Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova, is Friday. Khelif’s quarterfinal against Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori is Saturday.

Said Carini: “I have never felt a punch like this.”

Women’s sports are more susceptible to competitive inequities because women, by definition, naturally produce significantly less muscle-building testosterone than men and thus adding testosterone to the equation can quickly tip the scales.

Women accordingly obtain greater relative gains from anabolic steroids, which the Olympic movement has addressed with stringent anti-doping controls. Athletes transitioning from male to female after puberty, many scientists say, have the advantage of an irreversible shot of testosterone and musculature development; in recent years, many international sports federations have instituted bans on those who transitioned after puberty.

But what do you do about athletes assigned female at birth who remain female but have a Y chromosome, who exhibit some male sexual characteristics like internal testes, who naturally produce testosterone at higher levels than typical women?

What do you do about the gray area?

The IBA said its tests revealed Khelif and Lin have Y chromosomes, a strong indication that they fall into the DSD (Differences of Sex Development) or intersex bucket.

The problem: Society has neatly classified sports into men’s and women’s competitions when biology isn’t that linear. A more accurate division is those with a lot of testosterone and those without.

Testosterone is measured in nanomoles per liter (nmol/L), and a study commissioned by track and field’s world governing body found men have between 7.7 and 29.4 nmol/L. Women are between .6 and 1.68 nmol/L.

Now what happens when DSD women, with the ability to produce greater levels of testosterone, have several times that?

You get what happened in the women’s 800 meters at the 2012 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. South Africa’s Caster Semenya and two other African women identified as intersex ran away from the rest of the field to sweep the medals.

World Athletics tried for years to implement rules requiring that intersex women lower testosterone levels through hormone-suppressing medication and finally prevailed in 2019 in the Court of Arbitration for Sport, arguing that intersex women experienced a performance boost between 1.78 and 4.53% – or between 2 and 5.5 seconds over an 800-meter race.

The CAS panel conceded the case “involves a complex collision of scientific, ethical and legal conundrums” as well as “incompatible, competing rights.’ But in the end, it ruled, “such discrimination is a necessary, reasonable and proportionate means of achieving the legitimate objective of ensuring fair competition.”

Initially, track and field banned any female athlete with testosterone levels above 10 nanomoles per liter. Then it reduced the threshold to 5 nmol/L. Now it’s 2.5 nmol/L, which is still above that of the average woman.

But that’s track and field. The IOC only controls Olympic competition and leaves everything else to international federations. Most don’t have similar limits for female competitors, either because they don’t believe the science is definitive – specifically, whether the bodies of intersex women actually convert the extra testosterone into muscle – or because, perhaps, they don’t want to know.

What if there was similar testing in sports like basketball and swimming?

There are counterarguments. Height, wingspan and other biological disparities can be a competitive advantage in certain sports. How is the ability to produce extra testosterone any different?

“It’s all about loving one another,” Semenya said after winning the Rio gold. “It’s not about discriminating against people. It’s not about looking at people and how they look, how they speak, how they run. It’s not about being muscular.”

Running in lanes around a 400-meter track, though, is a different proposition than stepping into a ring with gloves strapped to your hands.

Where do you draw the line? When do shades of gray become black and white?

Carini asked the question Thursday at Paris North Arena.

Now comes the hard part: answering it.