While sport has long prided itself on its capacity to promote peace and reconciliation, there was widespread anxiety before the Paris Olympics that the wars in Europe and the Middle East would poison the event. Thankfully, there have been no major security incidents. Yet geopolitical conflict has played out at the Games, including in the controversy over women’s boxing.
On the eve of the Olympics, many feared the worst. Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the ensuing Israeli invasion of Gaza, now exacerbated by the threat of an all-out regional war, brought back the ghosts of the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, when Palestinian militants infiltrated the Olympic village, killing 11 members of the Israeli team.
This year’s Games were also preceded by a drawn-out and deeply polarised debate over the participation of Russian athletes, ignited by Moscow’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago. Eventually, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) allowed Russian athletes to participate as neutral individuals.
However, only a handful accepted the invitation after the Kremlin launched a concerted campaign to ridicule and delegitimise it. There was also a palpable fear that Moscow could jeopardise security, with French authorities arresting a Russian citizen on suspicion of plotting to destabilise the Olympics.
Fortunately, the Games are taking place in safety. Their politicisation, however, is taking a different yet arguably more extreme form. It began with the opening ceremony’s rendition of a feast of Dionysus – the Greek god of wine and ecstasy – by a group of drag artists. The representation was immediately confused with Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, triggering a furore among socially conservative groups worldwide.
Donald Trump called the ceremony a disgrace, saying that no such thing would happen when the next Summer Olympics convene in Los Angeles (which he no doubt assumes will be under his watch as president). Various Christian groups weighed in, too, including the pope, who deplored the offence to Christians. The explanations of the artistic director, Thomas Jolly, backed by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, did not quell the critics and Jolly has received online death threats.
But worse was to come in the women’s boxing arena, when Italian Angela Carini withdrew from a match after her Algerian opponent in the 66kg welterweight class, Imane Khelif, punched her face inside 30 seconds.
All hell broke loose after a viral disinformation campaign about Khelif’s gender identity. False claims about Khelif triggered well-meaning (albeit misinformed) expressions of concern for female sports, but mostly an ill-willed campaign to denigrate the IOC, which had accepted Khelif into the women’s competition.
Khelif was born and grew up female. She reportedly has differences in sexual development (known as DSD), but this has never disqualified her from competing in the Olympics. In fact, she participated in the 2021 Games in Tokyo, where she didn’t win a medal.
It’s true that Khelif was disqualified from competing at the world boxing championships 16 months ago, but that ban was imposed by the Russian-led International Boxing Association (IBA), which also banned the Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting, on the basis of gender-based tests that the IOC has described as lacking credibility.
I’m no expert on boxing regulations, nor on the rules of the IOC, but, as a martial artist myself, this much is clear: once both athletes had entered the ring, the time for contesting gender was over.
Yet amid a wave of rising and radicalised rightwing nationalism across Europe, Italian nationalists rose in defence of their compatriot. Carini received an invitation to the Italian senate from its speaker, Ignazio La Russa, and the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, embraced the boxer, declaring that the competition had been unfair. Matteo Salvini, the deputy prime minister, accused undefined “bureaucrats” of having allowed the match.
The women’s boxing issue is part of a much wider Russian-led campaign against the west, which has targeted the IOC because it has isolated Russia since its invasion of Ukraine. The IBA is led by a Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin, Umar Kremlev, and is sponsored heavily by Gazprom. In 2023, the IOC stripped the IBA of its recognition as the official boxing body for the Olympics after its suspension over governance issues and alleged corruption.
After Carini withdrew from the competition, Kremlev decried the Games as “outright sodomy” and offered a $100,000 consolation prize: $50,000 to Carini, $25,000 to her coach and $25,000 to Italy’s boxing federation, which they have reportedly refused to accept.
The wars being fought in Ukraine and the Middle East have a strong global dimension. Ukraine involves the global west (mainly North America and Europe) against the global east (Russia and China). In the Middle East, the global west’s failure to stop the war in Gaza and to hold Israel to account for its crimes is abhorred by the global south and capitalised on by Russia and China.
Neither war, however, is being fought purely on the battlefield. They are culture wars, too, and this latest salvo has hit the sports arena. An integral element of Russia’s strategy hinges on leveraging divisions in the west by weighing in on support of nationalist, far-right and populist groups whenever an opportunity presents itself, while elevating the Kremlin as a champion of social conservatism.
So, while the Olympic Games in Paris may have been spared traditional security threats, the culture wars ravaging the tournament have put the spotlight on another, just as dangerous, dimension of the geopolitical conflict dividing Europe and the world.
Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist
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• This article was amended on 8 August 2024. Eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team (athletes and coaches) were killed in the Munich massacre, not two as an earlier version said.
