Olympic Boxer Imane Khelif Faces Outrage & Gender Questions After Defeating Opponent In 46 Seconds

Source: Richard Pelham / Getty

It began with a fight—albeit very brief—between Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Italy’s Angela Carini in a women’s preliminary 66kg boxing match.

In a video of the match, the two start off in their corners before the referee signals for them to begin fighting. As soon as they meet, Khelif hits Carini with a right-handed jab. About a second later, Carini appears to mentally say, “Nah,” signaling to her coaching staff that the fight is over. The referee gets the message and immediately waves his hands to a crowd erupting… and that’s it.

Olympic athletes train for years and often dedicate their lives to their sport, so quitting is odd. But now we know it’s because the one punch Carini received from Khelif was enough for her to rethink the entire match.

“I felt a severe pain in my nose, and with the maturity of a boxer, I said ‘enough,’ because I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to, I couldn’t finish the match,” Carini said after the match.

The show of strength led internet sleuths down a path of Khelif’s past, and they discovered that Khelif was disqualified from the 2023 world championships for failing a gender eligibility test.

Plus, after winning a silver medal at the International Boxing Association’s (IBA) 2022 Women’s Boxing World Championships, she was disqualified from the same competition in 2023 because of elevated testosterone levels.

Khelif competed as a woman in the 2020 Summer Olympics; there’s no evidence of her being transgender , and Khelif was reportedly born as a biological female.

However, there’s been an outcry about the boxing match over transgender athletes.

One notable critique came from fellow boxer Logan Paul, who called it “the purest form of evil.”

He continued, “A man was allowed to beat up a woman on a global stage, crushing her life’s dream while fighting for her deceased father. This delusion must end.”

Paul deleted the initial post after being educated on Khelif’s true backstory, saying that he “might be guilty of spreading misinformation.” Still, he stood ten toes down that biological women and men shouldn’t compete against each other.

See the uncalled-for outrage below.