How a decade of IOC dithering enabled one of sport’s great scandals

3 months ago 29

By Oliver Brown

November 11, 2025 — 9.11am

Gratifying though it is that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has seen the light, finally countenancing an outright ban on trans-identifying males in women’s competition, forgive me if I resist much lavish praise.

The bureaucrats in Lausanne could have resolved this absurdity 10 years ago. Instead, their championing of the feelings of a few noisy ideologues above the rights of countless women has created manifest injustice at successive summer Games, with Kiwi weightlifter Laurel Hubbard taking a female rival’s rightful place in Tokyo and two boxers with sex test results indicating male chromosomes winning gold medals in Paris – as women.

Paris 2024 boxing gold medal winner Imane Khelif.

Even if the right decision has been reached, a decade of dithering has enabled one of the worst scandals ever perpetrated in the name of sport.

Forget the framing of a “transgender ban”. This is a ban on permitting male advantage in potentially lethal sports such as boxing, where men can punch more than twice as hard as women.

In what Orwellian universe can a ban in these circumstances be deemed controversial? Better ask Thomas Bach, the former IOC president, so desperate for the approval of gender activists that he appeared oblivious to the concept of biological sex, or to why the female category existed at all.

Now that Kirsty Coventry, Bach’s hand-picked successor, is at last listening to the science, the instinctive reaction is twofold.

International Olympic Committee president Kirsty Coventry.

On the one hand, there is relief we no longer have to endure such spectacles as Italy’s Angela Carini being beaten into submission in 46 seconds by an opponent who had failed sex tests, or Nauru’s Roviel Detenamo finding her Olympic weightlifting dream dashed by a biological male 25 years her senior.

But on the other, there is fury at the human cost that the IOC’s delay has incurred – for the women denied Olympic medals, for the athletes deprived of a right to fairness and even basic safety, and for the dissenting academics hounded almost into oblivion.

It was instructive to read Dr Emma Hilton’s reaction to the IOC’s move. A developmental biologist at the University of Manchester, she had warned of the dangers of Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting – already disqualified at world championship level for XY chromosome readings – fighting women long before they both took gold in Paris.

“You just can’t do it,” she told me, 72 hours before Khelif’s battering of Carini. But Bach went ahead and allowed it anyway, on the pretext that Khelif and Lin could show an ‘F’ in their passports. Womanhood, according to the most powerful figure in global sport, was nothing more than a letter in a document.

Laurel Hubbard competes at the Tokyo Olympics in the women’s over 87kg weightlifting category.

“Eight years of notebooks of tracking stats,” Hilton said, lamenting how long it had taken for the IOC to acknowledge what was staring it in the face.

“Six years after presenting my findings for the first time. Five years after writing the first peer-reviewed paper that established an evidence base for policy-making. An onslaught of abuse, multiple institutional complaints, attempts to trash my credibility. Arguments to force retractions, a report to the police, a trans-identifying male tweeting about me 400 times a month, no-platforming, refusals even to be in the same room as me.”

Coventry has faced none of this brutal blowback simply for stating biological truth. On the contrary, the former swimmer from Zimbabwe was a key member of the IOC executive committee that presided over the Paris boxing debacle.

Even after being elected as president in March, her commitment to protecting the integrity of women’s sport only went so far as establishing a “working group”. Only nine months later, is she prepared to state unambiguously that women’s sport should be for women, apparently on the strength of a “science-based review” by Dr Jane Thornton, once a Canadian Olympic rower.

‘In what Orwellian universe can a ban in these circumstances be deemed controversial?’

What about the other science-based reviews the IOC had seen during the previous decade, but blithely ignored? What about the case studies in plain sight?

The Rio Olympics in 2016, an event at which Coventry competed, yielded the most vivid illustration possible of the immutable benefits of male physiology, with all three medallists in the women’s 800 metres – Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba and Margaret Wambui – having differences in sexual development. Semenya’s specific condition, known as 5-ARD reductase deficiency, influences only male sexual characteristics before birth and during puberty.

At least World Athletics took action, with Lord Sebastian Coe first mandating testosterone suppression for these athletes, then ruling that they could not run as women, and this year introducing compulsory cheek swabs.

These straightforward swabs, conducted with a cotton bud and producing results that can last a lifetime, have long drawn the support of a majority of female athletes. When an IOC survey at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics asked whether these tests should continue, 82 per cent of women said yes.

Caster Semenya burst onto the world athletics scene at the 2009 world titles in Berlin.

Instead, the practice was abandoned in 1999, with the IOC so obsessed a quarter of a century later with placating the trans lobby that Mark Adams, Bach’s spokesman, warned against a return to the “bad old days” of sex testing.

Surely, the bad days were the period in which Bach prioritised the promotion of gender ideology above a level playing field. For Coventry to resolve now that men have no place in women’s sport is roughly akin to Sybil deciding in Fawlty Towers that the waiter’s pet hamster has no place in a Torquay hotel kitchen.

“Shall we get you on Mastermind, Sybil?” Basil asked her. “Special subject, the bleeding obvious?” You sense this is one area where vacillating IOC executives, belatedly nailing their colours to the mast once the hard work is done, might fare rather well. As for setting an example in truly courageous leadership, not so much.

Telegraph, London