Paris Olympics: Italy’s Angela Carini abandons fight with Algeria’s Imane Khelif, who failed unspecified gender test, after 46 seconds

PARIS — Less than a minute into her bout against an Algerian boxer barred from the 2023 world championships after failing a gender eligibility test, Italy’s Angela Carini decided that she was done.

She raised her hand to stop the fight after absorbing a flurry of powerful jabs from Algeria’s Imane Khelif in the opening seconds of the first round.

Carini told her coach Emanuel Renzini that her nose hurt too much for her to continue. Renzini urged her to try to make it to the end of the first round so that they could talk further, but Carini raised her hand again after taking just one more punch from Khelif and asked once more to abandon the fight.

“She’s too strong,” Renzini recalled Carini telling him.

A tearful Carini addressed reporters for 20 minutes after the fight, apologizing to her country for lasting only 46 seconds and lamenting that she had worked so hard for this moment only to have it end so quickly.

“I had entered the ring to fight,” Carini said in Italian after. “I didn’t give up, but a punch hurt too much and so I said enough. I go out with my head held high.”

Khelif’s thoroughly dominant showing on Thursday will only inflame the debate over whether she and Chinese Tapei’s Lin Yu‑ting should be allowed to compete at the Paris Olympics. Last year, at the World Boxing Championships in New Delhi, Khelif was disqualified hours before her gold-medal bout as a result of International Boxing Association rules that prevent athletes with XY chromosomes from competing in women’s events. The IBA disqualified Yu-Ting before her bronze medal bout for the same reason.

The International Olympic Committee has since stripped the IBA of its status as the global governing body for boxing because of long-running governance issues and a series of judging scandals. That leaves boxing in Paris under the umbrella of the IOC’s Paris 2024 Boxing unit, which has more relaxed rules than the IBA and has chosen to disregard the results of Khelif’s and Yu-Ting’s gender eligibility tests last year.

When asked about Khelif and Yu-ting on Tuesday, IOC spokesperson Mark Adams said, “I would just say that everyone competing in the women’s category is complying with the competition eligibility rules. They are women in their passports.”

“These athletes competed many times before for many years,” Adams added. “They didn’t just suddenly arrive.”

In a statement released Wednesday, the IBA explained that the disqualifications, “made after a meticulous review,” were the results of two tests conducted on both athletes, the first during the 2022 IBA World Boxing Championships in Istanbul, the second during aforementioned 2023 world championships.

“While IBA remains committed to ensuring competitive fairness in all of our events, we express concern over the inconsistent application of eligibility criteria by other sporting organizations, including those overseeing the Olympic Games,” the IBA said in its statement. “The IOC’s differing regulations on these matters, in which IBA is not involved, raise serious questions about both competitive fairness and athletes’ safety.”

Khelif was escorted past reporters by her coaches after Thursday’s fight and did not stop to talk. Only a day earlier, Algeria’s Olympic committee released a statement strongly condemning “the unethical targeting and maligning” of Khelif by foreign media outlets.

“Such attacks on her personality and dignity are deeply unfair, especially as she prepares for the pinnacle of her career at the Olympics,” the statement read.

Prior to Thursday’s fight, Italian officials publicly questioned the fairness of the IOC allowing Khelif to compete. Many people pressured Carini not to fight, Renzini said, telling the Italian boxer, “Don’t go, don’t go, please. She’s a man. It’s dangerous for you.”

When asked his opinion whether Khelif should be allowed to compete against women, Renzini was diplomatic.

“It’s not my decision,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to be in those shoes because I think it’s a very difficult decision.”

Before concerns about her eligibility emerged, Khelif drew attention primarily for the obstacles that she has overcome.

Khelif grew up in a rural village in Western Algeria, the sort of place where not everyone thinks sports are fit for girls. Not even her own father initially approved when she took up boxing, Khelif has said in previous interviews.

Boxing was such a passion for Khelif that she was willing to travel 10 kilometers by bus every day from her tiny village to the nearest boxing gym. To raise money for bus fare, she sold scrap metal for recycling and her mother sold couscous.

Khelif ascended quickly in her sport, finishing tied for fifth at the Tokyo Olympics in the women’s lightweight division. She then claimed gold at the 2022 African championships in the light welterweight division and silver at the world championships that same year.

The punching power of Khelif is what stands out from this widely circulated video of her December 2022 bout with Mexico’s Brianda Tamara. It’s difficult to watch the repeated blows that Tamara endured before the fight was stopped.

“When I fought with her, I felt very out of my reach,” Tamara wrote last year on X. “Her blows hurt me a lot, I don’t think I had ever felt like that in my 13 years as a boxer, nor in my sparring with men. Thank God that day I got out of the ring safely.”

Khelif is not the first athlete to face scrutiny as a result of a gender equity test. South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya, a two-time Olympic champion, has been the unwilling face of this issue for more than a decade.

Athletes have said the debate over the eligibility of Khelif and Yu-ting is different because of the safety element involved. No one endures any physical punishment if Semenya runs a fast time in the 800.

For Carini, this is the second straight Olympics to end in heartbreak. In Tokyo, her father died the night before her opening match.

“After that, she stopped boxing for two years,” Renzini said. “She came to me eight months ago and said, ‘I’d like to start training again.'”

The issues raised by Carini’s bout against Khelif are certain to come up again. Yu-ting will take on Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova in the 57kg division on Friday. Carini will compete in a women’s 66kg quarterfinal the following day.

Should those fights go on? Carini declined to share her feelings.

“It’s not up to me to decide,” she said.