Who are the women boxers in Olympics gender row?
women boxers at the centre of a gender row at the Paris Olympics took up the sport to escape from bullies: Lin Yu-ting had an abusive father while Imane Khelif was roughed up by boys in her village.
Both find themselves embroiled in a global maelstrom that has sparked reaction from US presidential candidate Donald Trump, Harry Potter author J.K Rowling and a host of commentators.
Online, they have been subjected to «an awful lot of abuse», Mark Adams, spokesman for the International Olympic Committee, said on Friday.
Khelif grew up in a poor rural family in the dusty Algerian province of Tiaret on the edge of the Sahara desert, a place of high temperatures and traditional values.
Her desire to play football with boys — and her ability to upstage them — led to intimidation and occasionally violence, with her talent for dodging punches leading her to consider taking up boxing.
To do so, she needed the approval of her father, a welder, as well as money to afford the bus trips to a training centre in a local town, an expense she helped pay for by collecting scrap metal.
«At the start of my career I felt that I might not be able to continue… because my family did not accept the idea, and also the views of society, which considered that I was doing something bad by doing my sport,» she told the official Algerian news agency APS in 2022.
After a career that has since taken her to the Olympics twice and the world championships, her parents are now «her biggest fans,» the 25-year-old told Unicef this year when she was
