The Summer Olympics in Paris are done and dusted, and as usual the games provided more than their fair share of incredible stories of obstacles overcome and dreams realized (or, in some cases, dashed). A few parting thoughts as we bid adieu to the City of Lights.
Quite a few people became incensed by the case of two “male” boxers competing in the women’s division. “Disgraceful, allowing men to beat up women!” was the story many chose to (erroneously) believe about Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting.
Trouble is, both Khelif and Lin were born women, identify as women, and have never been men. Their chief accuser — the International Boxing Association — has been discredited by many boxing federations, including Canada’s, and has refused to release the results of tests they say “prove” the two are men.
It’s no longer the case that XX and XY chromosomes clearly distinguish females and males, International Olympic Committee chairman Thomas Bach said. “This is scientifically not true any more and therefore these two are women and they have the right to participate in the women’s competition,” he said. “This is a question of justice.”
It’s interesting to contrast the hysteria surrounding the two female boxers with the near-silence surrounding (male) Dutch beach volleyball competitor Steve van de Velde, who took part in the games despite having been convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl when he was 19. Van de Velde was aware of the girl’s age when he travelled to Britain in 2014 and raped her three times over two days. Since then he has downplayed the incident, claiming that he "made that choice in my life when I wasn't ready, I was a teenager still figuring things out.”
Then there’s the 51-year-old male Turkish athlete, Yusuk Dikec, who went viral for winning a silver medal in shooting. His picture was everywhere, as people were taken by his nonchalant appearance: he wore a T-shirt, no special gear, and had his free hand tucked into his back pocket as he shot his way to a silver medal. How unutterably cool!
Trouble is, the pictures of him only told half the story. Quite literally: he won his silver medal along with a partner. Did this partner look every bit as cool and nonchalant? Absolutely! So why didn’t this other man go viral as well? Perhaps because his partner was a woman, as the event was the 10m Air Rifle Mixed competition. His partner’s name was Sevval Ilyada Tarhan, but she was almost nowhere to be seen as the internet swooned over Dikec. He gets celebrated; she’s literally out of the picture. Odd.
But not really. The greatest female gymnast of all time, Simone Biles, was criticized because her hair was “too messy” (she won three golds and a silver, so I daresay she wasn’t too fussed by the criticism). American female swimming great Katie Ledecky, whose two golds, a silver, and a bronze in Paris brought her total Olympic medal haul to 14, faces persistent questions about whether she is really a man (no, she isn’t). American female rugby star Ilona Maher released a video where she recounted how difficult it is to constantly field questions about whether or not she’s a man, due to her height and broad shoulders.
Funny how a male athlete gets a pass on truly heinous behaviour (such as raping a 12-year-old), and a male athlete is celebrated for his cool while his female partner is ignored, at the same time that female athletes face criticism for their appearance and disgusting speculation about whether they’re “really” women. And then there’s the Facebook commenter who took umbrage with the Canadian women’s beach volleyball team’s uniforms, claiming that the athletes were competing in their “underwear”.
They weren’t; they were in uniforms designed by a firm started by a longtime Ashcroft resident, Shannon Savage. It’s a great story (the Canadian duo won a silver medal, the nation’s first in women’s beach volleyball), but way to denigrate and belittle women! And if you really think they were wearing underwear, for Heaven’s sake don’t check out what the male divers were wearing. Ooh-la-la indeed.
