Imane Khelif and Angela Carini exchanged a few brisk punches in their 46 seconds of competition in the Paris ring. They were enough to persuade Carini that her Olympic debut was finished.
Carini didn’t shake Khelif’s hand after the referee formally raised it, but she cried in the ring after sinking to her knees. Minutes afterward, a still-tearful Carini said she quit because of the pain from those opening punches.
Khelif was disqualified from the 2023 world championships after failing an unspecified gender eligibility test, and her presence at the Paris Olympics has become a divisive issue.
Carini, who had a spot of blood on her trunks, said she wasn’t making a political statement and was not refusing to fight Khelif.
Khelif is an accomplished amateur who won a silver medal at the International Boxing Association’s 2022 world championships.
The IBA — which has been banned from the Olympics since 2019 after years of disputes with the IOC — disqualified her from last year’s championships shortly before her gold-medal match because of what it claimed were elevated levels of testosterone.
The 25-year-old entered the ring at the North Paris Arena to a chorus of cheers, but the crowd was confused by the bout’s sudden end.
The IBA has aggressively seized on the two boxers’ presence in Paris to criticize the IOC. After the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld the IOC’s ban earlier this year, the IBA appealed to the Swiss Federal Tribunal in a last-gasp attempt to beat the IOC.
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