San Francisco 49ers player Taybor Pepper has criticized Pat McAfee for his comments about Algerian boxer Imane Khelif after her controversial defeat of Italian Angela Carini at the Paris Olympics.
Carini gave up after 46 seconds after Khelif delivered a hard blow to the Italian. The Italian stated after the match that she had never received such a hard blow.
Khelif is an experienced amateur who won a silver medal at the 2022 International Boxing Association World Championships. She has been defeated nine times in her career and reached the quarterfinals at the last Olympic Games in Tokyo.
Pat McAfee addressed the controversy on his show Thursday afternoon, tweeting the clip with the caption: “We are all very confused by what is going on in women’s boxing. We hope people who are much smarter than us can find some answers to this.”
At one point in the nearly six-minute clip, McAfee says, “I didn’t do enough research on women’s boxing.
49ers player Taybor Pepper criticizes Pat McAfee for his comments about Imane Khelif
Italy’s Angela Carini was in tears after being stopped 46 seconds into the fight in France
“I didn’t do enough research”
Then stop talking before you spend 5 minutes spouting nonsense to a worldwide audience. https://t.co/uQlj0e3IBv
— Taybor Pepper (@TayborSnapping) August 1, 2024
“I saw that the International Boxing Federation has declared a number of boxers who compete in the Olympics, and are still competing, unfit to compete in women’s boxing. They either had too much testosterone or they were considered male, I believe, based on the XY chromosome, according to the research that I did.”
Khelif was born female and is not transgender. She has never been “considered a man” by any boxing organization, as McAfee put it.
It prompted a scathing response from Pepper, who retweeted McAfee’s clip and wrote: ‘“I didn’t do enough research”. Then stop talking before you broadcast 5 minutes of nonsense to a worldwide audience.’
The International Boxing Federation, which has been banned from the Olympics since 2019 after years of dispute with the IOC, disqualified Khelif from last year’s championships just before her gold medal bout over what it said were elevated testosterone levels.
McAfee repeatedly spoke on his show about transgender issues in relation to Khelif.
San Francisco 49ers player Taybor Pepper took to social media to lash out at McAfee
“To me, it feels like this conversation has been going on for a couple of years,” McAfee said. “And I also come from a very empathetic standpoint, because when we all learned about the transgender situation that was happening to people, we were all incredibly disappointed.
‘Well, that would be terrible if your soul didn’t match your body. That would be quite a conflict every day.
“When it comes to sports, the physical body is the one that competes. So I think there needs to be some kind of conversation, especially at a very, very high level.
‘Because when you’re talking about the Olympics and dreams and chasing them, then you have this girl from Italy, her whole life was dedicated to her life, and then she gets into a fight with someone who is physically more capable, in history, than she ever could be.’