Olympic thread

No I'm not a trained boxer but regardless of training I will never have the arm length or physical power that people like him or other leading heavyweights would have and I think that yes I technically would be an heavyweight as isn't that basically 14 stone and up?

Just seems stupid to me that sport and the Olympics is all about celebrating the physical prowess of athletes and the most physically superior ones win and that's brilliant when it suits our narrative but if the most physical one happens to have slightly more testosterone or look a bit more manly than other women then booooo it's horrible and an unfair physical advantage. Nobody is complaining about the unfair advantage that Jessica Ennis had over millions of other British women who just could not do what she can do because that suited the narrative but maybe if she was a bit more flat chested people would have been up in arms

 

After seeing all the misinformation around the boxer I spent some time doing more research. I think this tweet is very helpful to understand why although the boxer has female genitalia and been raised as a female, she has also experienced the hormonal sporting benefit of a male puberty.
Having read this and other information I don’t agree with letting athletes with this condition compete against women, however I do think it’s pretty cruel to accuse her of being a man, or having previously been a man.
https://x.com/hoovlet/status/1819041282594873759

 

Still absolutely crazy to me that there is even a suggestion that a woman with genetic superiority for sport isn't allowed to compete in a competition showcasing the best genetically superior athletes on the planet if that genetic superiority. We may as well just pick people at random to represent each country if genetic superiority and ability isn't allowed to be used anymore.

 

In the first photo, the two fighters look to have a very similar physique. The fighter on the left in red is slightly taller, the fighter on the right in blue is slightly heavier set. I'd say they look to be in the same weight class and neither looks to be at an obvious advantage.

In the second photo the fighter looks to have some facial features that might be considered masculine. Is that the point you're making, that facially she looks a bit like a man?

 

I think it might have been in Red Dwarf book where they suggested in the future, rather than banning performance enhancing substances and genetic advantages, we should actively encouraged them. Humans with extra long legs for sprinting/jumping, webbed hands for swimming etc.
It’s harsh in this case because until she qualified for the Olympics or World Championships etc, she most likely didn’t know she wasn’t a typical woman. She perhaps thought that her strength and physical attributes were down to her dedication and training. Imagine putting your life into something from 5 years old only to find out the world views you as “cheating” due to something you have no control over.

 

Well more accurately until she beat a russian boxer and the disgraced corrupt Russia authorities who have been stripped of their powers due to corruption banned her for an unspecified and unreleased reason that the IOC completely disagreed with

 

I understand your point and its valid mate, but suggesting 'slightly more testosterone' is so incredibly disingenuous. It deserves proper time invested and hopefully some sort of agreement made for future events as its something I can see and understand both sides of the argument for. Poor woman, must be awful having this being talked about world wide.

 

Expecting something magical from this lad

 

I posted a fair bit about the controversy over Imane Khalif in the Angela Carini thread..maybe we keep this thread clean for more general olympic chat/celebration?

 

I know very little about this subject, but I know what's written in that X article is talking about a very specific form of DSD of which there are literally thousands. This is the first point she makes:

Athletes with XY DSDs who have testes (usually internal), XY sex chromosomes, male-typical levels of testosterone, and functional androgen receptors are often described as females with "hyperandrogenism," i.e., abnormally high levels of testosterone. They experience physical benefits of this high testosterone during puberty, which translate into athletic advantages over females.

And this is someone who is actually intersex, who has XY chromosomes, who has internal testes, but nothing in the rest of the article applies to her.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g_cX5-qzQuc

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RDwlPDJNOwY

 

I’m not 100% about the science of it, but the post was reposted by the original tweeter in a thread about this case so I assumed it was relevant.

 

The author of the article knows a million times more about DSDs than I do. But she knows exactly the same as you and I about the specific condition relating to the athlete in question because details have never been released.

 

That's nothing like the same scenario.

 

Spot on, that's how I feel and you've expressed it so much better!

 

Short of removing male and females categories I think the reccurance of this debate is inevitable.

 

You've still not answered me Helen, can you clarify what you meant by this comment? Especially with your reply to a later comment that says calling her a man is cruel.

 

I suggest you look at the first photo again, as you're seeing something very different to me if you think they look similar. If you watch footage of the fight, the differences in physique are even more obvious.

As for the second photo, I think the masculinity is more apparent in the arms and neck than in anything else you're implying. I'm fairly confident that if you showed that picture blind to 100 people, more would think it was a male athlete than female.

As I'd already previously stated, I don't know what the solution is in these cases where there's an indication that someone has been born 'intersex'. The anomaly here is that two different governing bodies have ruled differently on the eligibility of two boxers (at least) who are being allowed to compete in the Olympics after having been previously banned/disqualified from doing so at the World Championships, which falls under IBU jurisdiction, rather than IOC. Both are as a consequence of their natural testosterone levels, so there's no accusation that either has attempted to cheat the system, but both have failed tests based on the sport's own definitions of allowable testosterone levels.

 

to quote my two sports mad daughters .....

'let's hope that women's voices are heard in this debate!'

 

That rowing was a close finish then from the GBR team

 

Including the boxers themselves I hope?