The Paris Olympics, Supreme Sportsmanship, or Hatred and Insults?
August 16, 2024
In a better world, Imane Khelif’s success would be celebrated.
Throughout history, women have had a lot to prove. Today, they are put positions where they must prove that they are physiologically women. Some arenas would go as far as excluding them from public spaces, just as in the early days of the Olympics, when married women were disallowed from entering the competition. Unmarried women were allowed to attend the sports competitions as spectators in honour of the god Zeus, alongside men, but only started participating in the 3000-year-old sporting event in 1900.
If you subscribe to the same opinions as British author J. K. Rowling and her followers, only women who fit into standard body images of what being female, or feminine enough look like, should be allowed to participate in the Olympic Games.
As 25-year-old Algerian boxer Imane Khelif took to the boxing ring and won gold for her country, Rowling posted on X, accusing Khelif of “being a man protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head”.
Other discriminatory and offensive posts posted by the Harry Potter author highlighted attitudes towards transgender women that Rowling continuously presents to the public. While certainly unjustified, in this case they are all the more devastating because Khelif is a born in the body of a woman. Raised as a woman. Which, unfortunately, she was compelled to clarify when she was subjected to other people’s assumptions regarding her identity.
On this occasion, the Sarajevo Open Centre, a human rights organisation, was quick to point out that neither sex nor gender are binary categories, and that the Algerian boxer’s participation in the Olympic Games triggered a wave of harmful reporting, misinformation and calls for discrimination. This which they claim, showed that lack of understanding about the complexity of the human body and of various identities leads to discrimination and attacks on the dignity of persons who do not fit into the binary divisions of sex and gender.
It’s really about boxing and its female competitors, and not about sex, which I assume the Olympic Committee should be concerned with, despite the ‘society of the spectacle’, a theory founded by French philosopher Guy Debord, where social relations between people are mediated by images.
How “interesting” that in our society, marked by patriarchal principles and toxic masculinity, men were unusually vocal in their condemnation of “man-on-woman” violence during Imane Khelif’s performance at the Olympic Games. Overnight, everyone became experts on the subject of the XY set of sex chromosomes, which journalist Jelena Kalinić writes about it on the Nauka govori portal. Not that anyone is expected to be an expert in a field that is not close to them, but our own lack of capacity to understand certain topics should be the key reason not to partake in commenting on them.
Imagine, for a moment, how humiliating it must feel to put anyone in the position of explaining that they are a woman?
The invisible achievements of women
In a better world, Imane Khelif’s success would be celebrated, especially since she comes from an underprivileged background. Khelif made it to the finals and secured a medal at the Olympics. We would glorify the winning mindset that guided every sporting success. Because, regardless of her physical superiority, Khelif also suffered defeats.
Khelif wasn’t alone in her treatment at this year’s Olympics, Lin Yu-ting, a boxer from Taiwan, went through similar torture as the Algerian boxer.
Regarding the extraordinary public lynching that these two participants of the Olympic Games in Paris underwent, koleKTIRV, an organisation working specifically on the rights of trans, intersex and gender variant persons, released this statement: “We emphasise that every person has the right to practice sports without discrimination, as confirmed by the International Olympic Committee, which clearly supported the attacked participants of the Olympic Games. We also want to reiterate, together with the International Olympic Committee, that all sportsmen and sportswomen have met all the criteria for joining the appropriate categories at the Olympic Games.”
In today’s society, be it a society of the spectacle or not, women are getting the raw end of the deal. And while the world was preoccupied with the blood of the two Olympians, most ignored a participant named Steven van de Velde, who was competing for the Netherlands in beach volleyball at the Olympics. He was convicted in 2014 of raping a 12-year-old girl from Britain. At that time, it was predicted that this would be the end of his successful Olympic career, but life in the male-centric world clearly had other plans for him.
Mental strength in sports
Even traditional games, such as stone-throwing, involve more than just physical predispositions – Olympic sports even more so – so reducing achieved results to the perception of the bodies of male and female competitors is just another offshoot of those who fight their own ideological battles, while flagrantly bypassing ethics and consideration of the consequences that harmful human action can cause.
It was a true spectacle we had the opportunity to see in the finals of the tennis competition at the Olympic Games in the men’s singles category. Judging by the first comments after the unusual match, Serbian Novak Đoković and Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz played one of the most important finals in the history of Olympic sports.
Having won every title he possibly could until then, 37-year-old Đoković became the oldest gold medal winner in tennis at the Olympic Games in the singles category, while Alcaraz, 21, was the youngest-ever finalist of the competition.
“Novak was playing great. He deserves this. In the tough moments he increased his level. He played unbelievable shots, an unbelievable game. I’m a bit disappointed but honestly I’ll leave the court with my head really, really high. I gave everything I had. Fighting for Spain was everything to me,” said Alcaraz after losing to Đoković.
The tennis final in Paris in 2024 is important on several levels. Besides returning the sport to its historic origins – tennis can be traced back to a 12th–13th-century French handball game called jeu de paume or “game of the palm” — the match was also a symbolic representation of a generational shift. It marked an end of an era, which lasted for two decades and was led by tennis heavy-weights like Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Đoković, and the beginning of an upcoming era, in which the golden pedestal will undoubtedly be occupied by Carlos Alcaraz.
The levelled quality of the game of both tennis players, the physical superiority of Alcaraz, who is 16-years younger, and the fresh knee injury and surgery of Novak Đoković ultimately resulted in the victory of the one who could settle for second place even before the final. The fact that Đoković won, certainly has to do with his physical fitness and the extraordinary medical skills of the team that takes care of his health, but most of all, it has to do with the triumph of mental strength shaped by victories.
The physical superiority of the body of an opponent 16 years his junior, at least in this case, at the crowning moment of a brilliant sports career, could not match that mental strength. The opponent himself said that in difficult moments Đoković plays at a higher level. This is how defeat is handled in the world of top sports and the manners that ought to characterise it. In this way, the Olympic Games keep the would focus on sports and the glory of superior sportsmanship, instead of non-sports-related topics, guesswork and arbitrary interpretations, from the symbolism of the opening ceremony to the participation of individual competitors. Especially female competitors.
Speculations and arbitrary interpretations about the Olympics’ Opening Ceremony
Before we devoted ourselves to online gender profiling while ignoring gender-based violence, the topic on the menu was the Opening Ceremony of the games.
Everyone with a remote control had something to say about the sporting event’s Opening Ceremony on July 26. From enthusiasm for the conceptual breakthrough, to criticism of the paraphrasing of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper”, which had an inclusive character in the Parisian interpretation. Bosnian writer Miljenko Jergović, redundantly, wrote about why. Seven days after the opening, the Vatican also issued a statement.
One of the dominant scenes from the art of Western Civilization served as a frequent paraphrase in the works of numerous artists, even local ones, so we could not even consider this segment of the ceremony innovative, least of all provocative, because it has already been seen so many times.
Had the art reference included people of the preferred gender persuasion, it would have probably gone unnoticed.
Owing to this example, we can conclude that transphobia is one of the dominant characteristics of today’s life and that it is a problem that we will increasingly often encounter in the future. In the society of the spectacle, removed from humanity. In the society of disinformation and discrediting, where ethics have long since lost their importance. Which doesn’t mean that there weren’t many amateur television lapses that don’t suit a serious culture such as the French.
The criticism of the opening, beyond the Last Supper, can be subsumed under two categories: the departure from tradition and the neglect of the stadium as a key place of the ceremony. Others liked the opening of the Olympic Games in Paris for the same reasons.
Judging by the comments of the numerous online audience and the virality of his performance, many also liked the Turkish sharp-shooter Yusuf Dikeç. His nonchalance during the competition and lack of protective equipment were the inspiration for the numerous memes, while his partner Şevvala İlayda Tarhan, with whom he won the silver medal, is hardly mentioned.
Of sports, as of life, we always have the right to expect more. Life often imposes limits that we do not find agreeable. That is why sports, and the results of sportsmen and women can serve as an excellent compensation, when we allow it to be only that – sporting entertainment.
From the perspective of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the amount of analysis of XY chromosomes, it would be useful to suggest that we pay attention to the fact that our Olympic team, with just five competitors, is smaller than the number of some of the other participating countries’ physiotherapists. This is not to disparage the results of our Olympians – it’s remarkable that they are there at all – I’m talking about the circumstances in which they prepare for the most prestigious of world competitions.
Often, to explain the overall context in which we live, it is best to turn to short forms and the conclusion offered to us on the Facebook page Relevantna Razina Duhovitosti (Relevant Level of Wit), which reads – for a country that has never won a medal in the Olympic Games, we seem to focus a lot on who is a man, and who is a woman.
Author: Kristina Ljevak Bajramović
Photo: ProPhoto1234 / Shutterstock
This article was financed by the European Union and the regional project “SMART Balkans – Civil Society for a Connected Western Balkans”, implemented by the Centre for the Promotion of Civil Society (CPCD), the Centre for Research and Policy Making (CRPM) and the Institute for Democracy and Mediation (IDM), which is financially supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The contents of the article are the sole responsibility of the project implementers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Centre for the Promotion of Civil Society (CPCD), the Centre for Research and Policy Making (CRPM), or the Institute for Democracy and Mediation (IDM).