First Imane Khelif… next, Lin Yu-ting: ANOTHER boxer set to fight at Paris Olympics despite failed gender tests

The gender conflict in boxing at the Paris Olympics will not be resolved for a while. On Friday, another boxer who failed the admission test will have to fight.

Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, two-time world champion, will succeed Imane Khelif in her second Olympic Games, where she will face Sitora Turdibekova of Uzbekistan in the under 57 kilogram class.

Algerian fighter Khelif has sparked a worldwide debate after her opponent, Italian Angela Carini, gave up the fight after 46 seconds on Thursday after two heavy blows, saying she had never been hit so hard in her life.

Both Khelif and Lin were deemed to have failed gender eligibility tests at last year’s world championships. Khelif, 25, has male XY chromosomes but is not transgender. Both fighters are female on their passports.

Lin is seeded first in the women’s 57-kilogram featherweight class, giving her a first-round bye before facing Turdibekova.

It follows Imane Khelif’s controversial victory over Italy’s Angela Carini on Thursday

Last year, she won the Asian Games title, qualifying for Paris. Lin won her first world title in 2018 and was the 2013 youth world champion.

Khelif and Lin are two-time Olympians and both competed in the Tokyo Olympics.

The IOC has repeatedly defended the boxers’ right to compete this week. Olympic boxing achieves gender equality for the first time this year, with 124 men and 124 women participating in Paris.

“Everyone who competes in the women’s category is adhering to the rules of participation in the competition,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said Tuesday. “They are women in their passports and that is what it says, that they are women.

“These athletes have competed many times before, for many years. They didn’t just arrive overnight.”

The IOC said it based its decisions on boxing participation on the gender rules that were in place at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Several sports have changed their gender rules over the past three years, including World Aquatics, World Athletics and the International Cycling UnionLast year, the athletics organization also tightened the rules for athletes with differences in gender development.

The IOC is responsible for boxing in Paris, having revoked the IBA’s Olympic status after years of governance problems, a lack of financial transparency and many alleged cases of corruption among the judging and refereeing staff.

The IBA is headed by President Umar Kremlev, who is Russian. He brought in Russian state-owned Gazprom as his primary sponsor and moved much of the IBA’s operations to Russia.

Last year it was the IBA that disqualified Ting and Khelif.