The female fighter Imane Khelif became the first Algerian boxer to win a gold medal at the Olympics. Despite being surrounded by the raging gender row controversy, Imane Khelif won the gold medal defeating the World Champion Yang Liu of China at the Paris Olympics 2024.
Algeria has won its first gold medal in the Paris Olympics and is positioned in 45th place in the overall Paris Olympics 2024 Medal Tally.
Since last week, Khelif has been the subject of one of the strangest controversies in Olympic history, caught as her manager. Ruchdi Hajjar, said, “between two parties” -Olympic leaders and a boxing federation no longer recognize whose Russian leader has challenged her gender. But on Friday, after beating China’s Liu Yang and winning the 66-kilogram gold medal, she leaped out of the ring and onto her coach’s shoulders.
Imane Khelif wins the gold medal for Algeria! 🥇🇩🇿
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Imane Khelif remporte la médaille d’or pour l’Algérie ! 🥇🇩🇿 #Paris2024 pic.twitter.com/XLhc9iEBXA— Paris 2024 (@Paris2024) August 9, 2024
“My message to the world, the whole world is: Hold on to Olympic values and not bully people,” she said after the fight.
Later, she walked into a news conference and said in Arabic that with the gold medal, “My honor is intact now.”
“As for whether I qualify or not, whether I am a woman or not, I have made many statements in the media,” Khelif said after her victory. “I am fully qualified to take part in this competition. I’m a woman like any other woman. I was born a woman, I lived a woman, and I competed as a woman, there’s no doubt about that. [The detractors] are enemies of success, that is what I call them. And that also gives my success a special taste because of these attacks,” said Khelif after the win.
Imane Khelif was subjected to intense scrutiny on social media with people questioning her gender as well.
“My honor is intact now,” Khelif said. “But the attacks that I heard in social media were extremely bad and they are meaningless and they impact the dignity of people and I think that now people’s thinking has changed.
Imane Khelif slammed the IBA for their actions and remained steadfast that her honor was above anything else.
The controversy came online when the International Boxing Association (IBA) disqualified Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting from the World Boxing Championship in 2023. But the IBA lost its status as the global governing body of boxing and the International Olympic Association took over and found the two boxers eligible.
“As for the IBA, since 2018 I have been boxing under their umbrella. They know me very well, they know what I’m capable of, and they know how I’ve developed over the years but now they are not recognized anymore. They hate me and I don’t know why.
” I send them a single message: with this gold medal, my dignity, my honor is above everything else,” concluded Imane Khelif.
