Imane Khelif wins gold – and defies a grueling debate

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Friday evening ended with a gigantic party at the Roland Garros sports complex. Imane Khelif entered the stadium at 11 p.m., and after the third round there was hardly anyone left in the stands: Even before the score was announced, everyone knew that the boxer had won her fight against the Chinese Yang Liu – gold for Algeria! Khelif hopped through the ring, jumped into the arms of her trainers and was carried through the stadium on their shoulders a short while later. Thousands of fans cheered her on, waving Algerian flags in the air, and the hall DJ played the Franco-Maghreb super hit “Tonton du Bled” in style – for many in the audience, this must have been the start of a long night.

Imane Khelif vs. Yang Liu: A fight with a special history

The fight had a special history. Imane Khelif was supposed to compete against Yang Liu at the 2023 World Championship. Shortly before the final, however, she was disqualified by the organizer. Yang won the title.

On Friday evening, the 32-year-old athlete from Inner Mongolia was able to land many hits. But Khelif was quicker, both with her legs and her fists, and ultimately clearly superior to her experienced challenger: the five judges unanimously gave her the lead in all three rounds.

After the victory, Imane Khelif had tears of joy in her eyes, and her coaching staff also looked relieved. Perhaps everyone was just happy that it had finally been decided: The Algerian is the first woman from the country and the first African to win Olympic gold in boxing. And no controversy about hormones or gender can take the medal away from her.

Imane Khelif: They wanted to portray her as a guy who beats women

As is well known, all Olympic Games have their special moments and scandals – but nobody would have thought that women’s boxing and X chromosomes would become the most discussed topics of Paris 2024. Since Imane Khelif’s first victory in the French capital, the Internet has been overflowing with photos and theories aimed at portraying the Algerian as a “biological man”. Powerful spokesmen such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk and JK Rowling are ranting against the athlete, claiming that she is in fact a muscle-bound guy who beats up women with the approval of the Olympic Committee.

Meanwhile, in Khelif’s home village of Bibane Mesbah, her father sat in front of the cameras in a brown Edeka T-shirt and showed the journalists childhood photos: “My daughter is a girl!” One can only imagine how humiliating that must have been for everyone involved. After her second competition, Imane Khelif broke down crying. Everyone who knows her said that this had never happened before.

Imane Khelif’s fame has even reached pop culture

In Algeria, the 25-year-old is now a national heroine. Her fame has even reached pop culture: “Say what you want about me. Lie as much as you want – I don’t care,” sings the French-Algerian artist Lyna Mahyem, and she is by no means the only one to dedicate a song to the boxer. Khelif is celebrated as a fighter, as an icon of resistance – topics that also quickly get the Internet boiling over. As soon as the boxer stepped into the ring in Paris, it was hyped up as a fight against Western dominance and its racism. It is also difficult to imagine what this pressure must have meant for the athlete.

“Never before has an Algerian athlete been talked about as much as poor Imane,” sighed an Algerian journalist in the press gallery at the end of the competition day. “Instead of being able to concentrate on her sport in peace, she suddenly found herself at the center of all geopolitical disputes.” He was not exaggerating. This week, Russia used the debate about Imane Khelif as a cue in the UN Security Council: Paris was showing how women’s rights were being undermined by the LGBT movement, which the West wanted to impose on the rest of the world. The Algerian spokesman, who was apparently reluctant to see his country placed in the context of LGBT, indignantly criticized this as agenda-setting. After all, Imane Khelif was born a girl and was therefore undoubtedly a woman. The president of the Algerian Olympic Sports Confederation, in turn, used the hostility towards his athlete to make an anti-Semitic statement: The boxer

Meanwhile, on the Algerian National Road 23 in Khelif’s home village, they celebrated the “Lioness of Tiaret” for nights on end, whose improbable career began in this place. The 2024 Summer Olympics are a victory for Algeria’s women: Alongside Imane Khelif – they are being cheered with a fervor that is usually only reserved for footballers.

The athletes will remain important role models, not only for girls. However, the controversy over gender categorization in women’s boxing will also remain. For Imane Khelif, who has been training mainly at a club in Nice since 2022, the coaches see no further problems in this regard. Looking back to Paris 2024, however, the most important thing seems to be that the discussion is not left to social networks. Because there are only losers.