Leading with the chin

THE WORST THING WE READ™

The Press Takes a Swing at a Bogus Controversy

ON SATURDAY MORNING, the biggest story about the Olympics on the front page of the New York Times was about an event that had happened two days before. Or more precisely, it was a story that appeared to be about an event—complete with a photo of two athletes in mid-competition—but was not about the event at all. 

The photo showed the Italian boxer Angela Carini, in an opening-round bout, trading off-target punches with Imane Khelif of Algeria. It wasn't much of an action shot, but there hadn't been much action: Carini had quit 46 seconds into the bout, after Khelif punched her hard in the nose.

What the Times was really writing about, though, was how "Olympic officials were working urgently to rebut what they described as widespread 'misinformation'" about Khelif and another boxer, Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan. There was scarcely any need for scare quotes around "misinformation"; the Boston Globe was in the middle of retracting and apologizing for a headline it had put on an AP story about Khelif, reading—falsely—"Transgender boxer advances." 

Khelif and Lin are both women, and they have never lived as anything but women—in gender-identity terminology, they are cisgender women who were assigned female at birth. Despite that, last year, the International Boxing Association disqualified them from its world championships with no clear explanation, vaguely saying they had failed an eligibility test, a decision the Times reported "was decided solely by the association's chief executive and later ratified by its board." The IBA has no authority over the boxing in Paris, because last year the International Olympic Committee expelled it for corruption. 

The Times headline described the Olympic officials as trying "to Quell Fury Over Fairness," but there was no identifiable concern about fairness in the story, either. The Olympics are full of people using overwhelming physical advantages to demolish their opponents, but Khelif is not an extraordinary hard-punching boxer; Carini got smashed in the face not because the Algerian smashes everyone in the face but because the Italian decided to throw a slow, looping right while letting her left hand drift down and away from her head, opening a pipeline a foot wide that led straight to her nose.