Low Punches in High Places
The Cold War was, to someone growing up in the 1980s, a terrifying time to be alive. We were assured that mutual destruction was not only a possibility, it was on the way within the next few weeks. Probably on a Tuesday because everyone knows that Tuesday is the worst day of the week. In Them Olden Days, British television was beholden to a set of standards that meant they had to broadcast a certain amount of ‘public information’ per day and these normally came in the form of short vignettes about the dangers of crossing the road, or trying to retrieve errant frisbees from electricity sub-stations. Nobody under 50 will ever know the horror of the girl’s scream ‘JIMMMMYYYY!!!’ as her brother is turned into one of those comedy x-ray skeletons by 70 billion gigawatts of death. Jimmy died in that one. In the one where he hit an overhead cable with his fishing line, he merely got a big shock and a few days off school. All this as you ate your corned beef sandwiches, waiting for Doctor Who to start. At the same time, they would occasionally put out an information film about what to do when the Soviets dropped nukes on us, which seemed mostly to consist of hiding under the stairs. Faced with a gazillion megatons of Red Menace Death, that seemed a little inadequate. But I think it was just meant to give you something to do in the three minutes between the sirens going off and you being turned into plasma.
Of course, none of this transpired. The Cold War was instead fought in backrooms and in shadows with whispers and winks and it that respect it’s pretty much still going on.
From election interference to Russian oligarchs buying up huge swathes of prime London real estate and hobnobbing with the political elite, to Russian tourists coming to see the world-famous Sailsbury cathedral, for some apparent reason, and leaving behind them a wake of poison death, Putin’s fetid little paws are all over the minutiae of Western society, nudging here, probing there, being an asshole just enough to make everything seem slightly off kilter. Propaganda these days isn’t spread at the hustings, it’s spread on Facebook and TikTok in subtle ways and with brown envelopes stuffed full of cash channeled through accounts in the Cayman Islands.
What has this got to do with the current uproar over the Olympics? I thought about just addressing the whole stupidity of the arguments over Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, but we’re sensible people and we know that these people are women and have nothing to do with being transgender or being ‘men’. They are women. End of story.
But where has this story come from? Both of these athletes have previously competed as women without any problem. The problem is that it’s hard to pin down exactly what it is they’ve been accused of by the governing body of amateur boxing, the International Boxing Federation. Or, come to that, what the IOC’s take on it is.
The IBA are incredibly vague on what the tests the pair have ‘failed’ actually consist of. It’s not a transparent process. That doesn’t mean the athlete’s results should be published, but the specifics of what the IBA tested for aren’t even clear, or by what metric they designate a failure. The IOC has been very clear that they won’t reveal any information in this regard, either. Which seems perfectly reasonable, but does beg the question of what these women are even being accused of.
Into that void, of course, spills the nonsense of conspiracy theory weirdos and JK Rowling, who now appears to be one or two large gin and tonics away from declaring that people she just doesn’t like can’t be women.
But if we look back a bit at the story, something else emerges and it is related to you-know-who. At the time of Lin’s test last year, which revealed ‘an abnormality’, she had never failed any sort of test before and certainly never one related to gender. It had never been an issue. There was some speculation that the ‘abnormality’ was related to medication taken by athletes to adjust their menstrual cycles to match the competitive calendar, but the idea that Lin ‘was a man’ never even came up.
There’s more to this, as well. The IOC and the IBA have, for a while now, been at loggerheads over the sport’s further inclusion in the Games. As it stands, boxing’s participation in four years’ time isn’t clear. The current competition is being mandated under IOC rules, not IBA ones.
If we go back to 2020, a man by the name of Umar Kremlev, who absolutely does not live in a hollowed-out volcano, became the president of the IBA. He’s Russian, of course, and whilst he is nominally politically neutral and has been involved in boxing for most of his life, nobody gets high up anywhere in Russian society without a certain chap peering over their shoulder. At the same time he became president, he signed a huge sponsorship deal with Russia’s state energy company, Gazprom, effectively putting the IBA under Russian state sponsorship.
2022 came and you-know-who invaded Ukraine and because of the bad publicity, the IOC wanted the IBA to drop Gazprom. There were other issues to do with referring and judging that the IOC demanded reform of, and despite the IBA’s claims that the Gazprom sponsorship had only lasted for a year and was no longer current, the IOC stripped them of the right to run the Olympic competition.
The IBA appealed this decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and in April of this year, their appeal was turned down citing continued concerns over the financial irregularities as well as governance issues.
This comes at a time when the IOC are also openly in conflict with Russian sport. Russia is banned from sending an official delegation of athletes to Paris and there are only a dozen or so athletes from Russia at the game who have qualified under the IOC’s independent criteria, most of them tennis players. So, we have a Russian federation openly hostile with the IOC, alongside another conflict in which an organization that appears to be fully backed by Russian money and influence has also been banned from operating at the games.
That suddenly two athletes are banned by the IBA and the flames of transgender warfare have been widely stoked on the internet, fires which need little kindling to start burning, has been the dominant story of the past few days surrounding the Olympics. Whether this is a deliberate attempt to shit all over the IOC’s and Paris’ big party, alongside the other issues surrounding the opening ceremony, I’ll leave it to you to decide.
But, historically speaking, this particular train has never been late.