Nick Wright subtly calls out Pat McAfee's Imane Khelif comments

Nick Wright did not name Pat McAfee in his rant about uninformed people discussing the Olympic boxing controversy, but the ESPN host certainly fits the description.

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif has been the subject of global discussion and debate after Italy’s Angele Carini forfeited their match at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Carini’s forfeit brought attention to previous rulings on Khelif’s gender by the International Boxing Association (IBA). Many prominent people have since amplified the controversy by misidentifying the facts of Khelif’s gender, with ESPN host Pat McAfee among them .

On the latest episode of Colin Cowherd’s podcast for The Volume, Wright addressed the people who rushed to discuss Khelif’s competing in the Olympics with an uninformed viewpoint of the controversy because of social media pressure.

“The amount of people, prominent people that were like, ‘Well, it’s showing up on Elon Musk’s propaganda machine, so it must be the story to talk about, so I’m going to on the front end be like, I don’t know what I’m talking about it, but let’s talk about it.’ What are you doing?” Wright asked. “What are you doing? And the reason folks, I believe, talked about that, knowing they didn’t know anything, was because they didn’t want people to tweet to them, ‘You’re afraid to talk about it.'”

Even if Wright didn’t intend to criticize McAfee, he criticized the retired NFL punter turned media star by association. McAfee is a prominent person who said, “I haven’t done enough research” on Khelif competing in the Olympics before engaging in a five-minute rant on the topic, stating she was “deemed a male” while referencing transgender people.

Khelif was born a female and identifies as a woman; she even competed in women’s boxing during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics without controversy. It wasn’t until 2023 that Khelif’s gender became a point of contention when she was disqualified from the world championships after failing a test from the IBA that reportedly revealed high levels of testosterone and indications of XY chromosomes. The IBA, however, was banished from the Olympics last year and has not revealed details about the tests that disqualified Khelif in 2023.

“Always be leery of folks who, every time they make one of those mistakes, is slanted in the same direction,” Wright continued. “If you’re just a dumb guy that’s like, ‘Hey, we’re just talking.’ Then, you’ll make mistakes in both directions. Then, sometimes, you’ll say something that is wildly wrong on the conservative side. And sometimes you’ll say things that are wildly wrong on the liberal side…in my experience, what tends to happen is folks consistently make this mistake slanted in the same direction of people yelling at them on the internet, and then they’re like, ‘Well, I told you I’m not that bright.’ I don’t know; you seem bright enough to never make the mistake in the other direction.”

McAfee regularly touts that the goal of his show is to celebrate sports and claims he’s not smart enough to weigh in on other topics. Yet when McAfee does weigh in on other topics, it’s often slanted in the direction of conservative messaging , but he seems reluctant to own it.

While McAfee seemingly gave in to the people tweeting, “You’re afraid to talk about it,” before he was informed enough to discuss it, Wright praised himself for avoiding the topic on his own podcast last week.

“We didn’t make the mistake so many people made,” Wright said. “Which was talk about a serious, real-life issue – and by the way, that’s a real human being that has to go back to her country – when we had none of the information just because Twitter was yelling at us to do it.”

[ The Colin Cowherd Podcast ]

The post Nick Wright slams anyone addressing Olympic boxing controversy after they admit ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about.’ appeared first on Awful Announcing .