Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif Wins Olympic Gold After Gender Uproar

Iman Khalifa is Khalif, the Algerian boxer who was accused of being a man after her opponent withdrew after she hit her hard, won the gold medal after defeating China's Yang Liu.

“I'm very happy. For eight years, this was my dream, and now I'm the Olympic champion and the gold medalist,” Khalif said after his unanimous decision win. “I worked for eight years, didn't sleep, eight tiring years. Now I'm the Olympic champion.”

Khalif won the first two rounds of her fight against Liu in the women's middleweight division. According to the Associated Press, Khalif previously said she “doesn't care” about the controversy surrounding her gender and is instead focused on the fight. She has won all four of her Olympic bouts.

“I want to tell the whole world that I am a woman, and I will remain a woman,” she said over the weekend.

Last week, social media erupted after false claims that Khalif was a secret transgender woman who had sneaked into the women’s category at the Games. The allegations came after her Italian opponent, Angela Carini, walked out less than a minute into the fight, saying: “I’ve never been hit so hard in my life.” Carini later said she “wanted to apologise” to Khalif, adding: “All this controversy makes me sad.”

Elon Musk posted several times on X about the match between the two women, agreeing that “men don’t belong in women’s sports.” Anti-trans author J.K. Rowling also criticized Khalif, calling him “a man who knows he’s protected by a misogynistic sports establishment,” and “enjoying the annoyance of a woman he just punched in the head, and her life’s ambitions shattered.” Even Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that he would “ban men from women’s sports.”

The charges against Khalif stem from an incident in 2023 in which she and boxer Lin Yu-ting were suspended from the AIBA Women's World Boxing Championship. At the time, AIBA President Umar Kremlev claimed that genetic tests had shown Khalif to have “XY chromosomes” and therefore be ineligible to compete. The specific tests performed and their results have not been publicly disclosed, and Khalif has disputed this claim.

The International Boxing Federation was stripped of its role in organising the Olympic Games in 2019 amid corruption allegations and evidence the organisation manipulated matches in Rio. Lin is expected to compete for gold against Poland's Julia Sieremetta in the women's featherweight.