Before her Olympic match against Imane Khelif, Italian boxer Angela Carini received pressure from the Iba, the International Boxing Federation. This was revealed by the president of CONI, Giovanni Malagò, in an interview with the newspaper The print.
“Angela showed me the pressure she was subjected to in the days preceding the meeting by the IBA,” Malagò reports.
In the match against Khelif, valid for the round of 16 of the welterweight division, Carini retired after just 45 seconds, complaining that she had received a punch to the nose that was too strong, which scared her.
Last year, the IBA – an organization not recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) – excluded Khelif from the World Championships final, deeming her unfit to compete against female boxers.
In recent weeks, news has spread that the exclusion was due to excessive levels of testosterone detected in the Algerian boxer’s blood, but the IBA has denied having subjected her to testosterone tests, without however specifying further – for privacy reasons – the reasons for the exclusion.
One of the hypotheses put forward – which however has no official confirmation at the moment – is that Khelif is an intersex subject: that is, he would have the XY sex chromosomes typical of a male despite having the genitals typical of a female.
What is certain is that for the IOC the athlete meets the parameters required to be admitted to the women’s Olympic competitions.
“I received from the highest medical authority of the IOC the document on the regularity of Khelif’s participation in the tournament,” Malagò confirmed. “The rest is just chatter that overwhelmed Angela.”
“I am not making any accusations,” the president of Coni continues, “but I am not at all surprised that the issue has become political. Everything is exploited today by politics. On the right as well as on the left.”
“Do you know what bothered me most of all?”, Malagò concludes, addressing the press journalist: “That for a couple of days the media talked more about this case than about the medals won by athletes who had been preparing for years”.
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