PARIS — Less than a minute into her controversial fight against an Algerian boxer who failed a gender eligibility test last year, Italy’s Angela Carini decided that she was done.
Just 40 seconds into the first round, Carini raised her hand to stop the fight after absorbing a flurry of jabs from Algeria’s Imane Khelif. Carini told her coach Emanuel Renzini that her nose hurt too much for her to continue. Renzini encouraged her to try to make it to the end of the first round so that they could talk further. Six seconds later, Carini raised her hand again after taking one more punch from Khelif and asked to abandon the fight.
“She’s too strong,” Renzini recalled Carini telling him.
A tearful Carini addressed reporters for 20 minutes after the fight, apologizing to her country for not being able to go on and lamenting that she had worked so hard for this moment only to have it end so quickly.
“I had entered the ring to fight,” Carini said in Italian after. “I didn’t give up, but a punch hurt too much and so I said enough. I go out with my head held high.”
Khelif was escorted past reporters by her coaches and did not stop to talk. Only a day earlier, Algeria’s Olympic committee released a statement strongly condemning “the unethical targeting and maligning” of Khelif by foreign media outlets.
“Such attacks on her personality and dignity are deeply unfair, especially as she prepares for the pinnacle of her career at the Olympics,” the statement read.
Khelif’s thoroughly dominant showing on Thursday will only inflame the debate over whether she and Chinese Tapei’s Lin Yu‑ting should be allowed to compete at the Paris Olympics. Last year, at the World Championships in New Delhi, Khelif’s failed gender eligibility test led to the International Boxing Association disqualifying her hours before her gold medal bout. Yu-ting was disqualified before the bronze medal bout for the same reason.
The International Olympic Committee has since stripped the IBA of its status as the global governing body for boxing because of long-running governance issues and a series of judging scandals. That leaves boxing in Paris under the umbrella of the IOC’s Paris 2024 Boxing unit, which has more relaxed rules than the IBA had and has chosen to disregard the results of Khelif’s and Yu-Ting’s gender eligibility tests last year.
When asked about Khelif and Yu-ting on Tuesday, IOC spokesperson Mark Adams said, “I would just say that everyone competing in the women’s category is complying with the competition eligibility rules. They are women in their passports.”
“These athletes competed many times before for many years,” Adams added. “They didn’t just suddenly arrive.”
