It has taken the International Olympic Committee (IOC) over a year since the gender controversy at the 2024 Paris Games to finally consider allowing only women to compete in women’s sports.
The IOC is reportedly set to announce a ban on transgender-identifying males from competing in women’s events. The ban would also likely include male athletes with differences in sex development (DSD).
New IOC president Kirsty Coventry vowed to bring in the policy as part of her election campaign, and set up a working group on the protection of women’s sport.
Last week, the IOC’s medical and scientific director Dr Jane Thornton updated its members as the organisation works through the details of the potential move.
As first reported by The Times, she revealed that initial findings of the science-based review suggested that athletes born male retain physiological advantages, even after reducing testosterone levels.
Men punch, on average, over 2.6 times harder than women, so boxers born male can have a clear power advantage if competing against female boxers.
BBC Sport has been told any blanket ban is unlikely to be introduced in time for February’s Winter Olympics in Italy, but could be brought in before the Los Angeles Games in 2028.
The tipping point came during the 2024 Paris Olympics, when two DSD male boxers – Imane Khelif (Algeria) and Lin Yu‑ting (Taiwan) – were allowed to fight women and won gold medals in their respective weight categories.
At the time, the IOC said it made its eligibility decisions on boxers based on the gender-related rules that applied at the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016.
Several sports have updated their gender rules over the past four years, including World Aquatics, World Athletics and the International Cycling Union. The track body also tightened its rules on athletes with differences in sex development in 2023.
Despite this, the IOC had doubled down on its decision, with the then IOC President Thomas Bach saying: “We have two boxers who are born as a woman, who were raised as women, who have passport as women, who have competed for many years as women. This is the clear definition of a woman.”
But testing by the International Boxing Association (IBA) in 2023 showed that Khelif and Lin have male XY chromosomes in their DNA, though neither are transgender. Male chromosomes are designated by an X and a Y, while females have two X’s.
At the global level, there has been progress since, with IBA’s replacement body, World Boxing, introducing mandatory sex testing to determine eligibility for international events.
If the IOC does finally accept the reality of gender differences in physique, it will make the ring far safer for female boxers and provide a clear level-playing field for the sport.
It couldn’t come too soon as Lin returned to the ring in October in controversial fashion, beating a female opponent in 1½ minutes in Taiwan’s National Games.
Lin had pulled out of last month’s World Championships in Liverpool, where the stricter World Boxing rules were in force. But there is still no such barrier to fighting at the domestic level in Taiwan.
According to reports, the fight in the women’s 60kg division ended after just 1min 34sec of the opening round after 29-year old Lin beat 19-year old Pan Yan-fei with “several head shots”.
After Pan’s coach threw in the towel, the referee halted the match and the result was recorded as “abandoned”.