Opinion: On the morning of Thursday, August 1, there was something remarkable about the print edition of the New Zealand Herald: the first three pages of its Sport section were about women. Actually, a particular team of women. The back-page headline hailed the Black Ferns Sevens as “golden goddesses” after their Olympics victory.
And why not? There may not be a more exciting player to watch in any sport than Michaela Blyde, and Sarah Hirini has the kind of spooky game sense that should mark her in the pantheon of rugby loose forwards.
But even as the Black Ferns celebrated, a much darker story of women in sport was reaching boiling point. Days before, Ilona Maher, a star of the bronze medal-winning US sevens team, posted a tearful Instagram video addressing a recent “ramping up” of claims that she was “a man and being called masculine and asking if I’m on steroids … they think women should be fragile and petite and quiet and meek. But that’s not the case”.
Maher’s heartfelt statement was largely sympathetically reported, but Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was not so fortunate. Even before her Italian opponent Angela Carini bizarrely conceded their 66kg Olympic bout after 45 seconds, there had been claims that Khelif should not be allowed to fight because she was a man.
Afterwards, the floodgates opened. And yet, there is no more reliable evidence that Khelif is pretending to be female than that Maher is. Which is: none.
Khelif was ejected from last year’s World Boxing Championships by the International Boxing Association after IBA chair Umar Kremlev declared she had failed a gender test. The IBA has consistently refused to release the result of this supposed test and a previous one in 2022, or even say what the tests were. It has also not explained why Khelif would have been allowed to compete in the 2022 championships and also declared eligible – until she wasn’t – in 2023.
These details were of little matter to tireless “gender critical” activist JK Rowling, who posted a picture of Khelif on X decrying, “The smirk of a male who knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head.” But media reported as fact that Khelif has “naturally high testosterone levels”, or XY chromosomes.
Either could conceivably be true – if only because both are hardly unknown in women’s elite sport – but the still-unverified IBA claim was the first time Khelif’s womanhood had been questioned. Pause and imagine how we’d feel if the same thing happened to, say, Portia Woodman.
The IBA subsequently offered Carini $50,000 in “prize money” as if she had won the gold medal, even though IBA has been removed from its role in Olympic boxing by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). IBA gave prize money to all Paris 2024 medal winners in boxing, with the cash coming from Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled oil company, which is generally regarded as corrupt and an instrument of Kremlin policy.
IBA was banned by the IOC last year, based on well-attested allegations of bribery and match-fixing.
It’s not the only time Russia has cropped up lately. Russian national Kirill Gryaznov was arrested in connection with a “destabilisation” campaign aimed at the Olympics, which included disinfomation videos (including one with an AI-generated voiceover imitating Tom Cruise) and, possibly, sabotage attacks on French railways.
In Britain, the lie that the teenager accused of a horrific stabbing attack was a Muslim asylum-seeker, which resulted in a terrifying outbreak of far-right mob violence, was launched on a Russian-connected fake news site and amplified by a celebrity anti-lockdown activist.
If Vladimir Putin really is orchestrating a campaign to make us hate each other, he’s doing pretty well right now.
