No. 218: IMANE KHELIF & "Z" / The online bullying of the Algerian boxer brings back personal memories of an incredible athlete whose career was sadly cut short.

Athletes train all their lives to get to the Olympics, but Z was a phenom, making to the Games in L.A. in a sport she was introduced to barely six months before. Then there was the matter of gender.

Imane Khelif of Algeria in the ring in Paris.

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THE quadrennial in Paris is half over and I don’t know if we’ll have one defining athlete that stands above all others. Simone Biles for career accomplishment will be up there and for Canadians it’s been the summer of Summer McIntosh.  

One story more than any other has ginned up social-media bile, most of it half-informed at best, too much of it utterly mis-informed, by turns hurtful and hateful and glorying in its ignorance, dirtier than the Seine. Considering the forum, it’s no surprise that a political agenda is on the fringe for some of it and foundational for deeply cynical others.

The focus is on an athlete that in most circumstances would have flown under the radar: Imane Khelif, an Algerian in the women’s boxing competition who has advanced to the medal rounds.

Imane Khelif fires a jab to the face of a Hungarian opponent.

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Khelif wasn’t a marquee name by any stretch—in all the mainstream international news coverage in advance of the Games she was never mentioned. Her event wasn’t one of those that you’d categorize as appointment viewing—this wasn’t the 100 metres on the track or in the pool, sorting out the world’s fastest, nor superheavyweights cleaning and jerking to determine who’s the strongest in the world in an IOC-sanctioned way, nor those somersaulting off the bars in the most aesthetically pleasing acrobatic way. Who among us has watched an entire women’s boxing bout at any games ever?^[i] Not many without a personal vested interest, I suppose.

Khelif became Topic No. 1 or something close to that after her bout with an Italian opponent who quit midway through the first round after taking a couple of heavy shots. In the vernacular of youth boxing, hers was what we used to call a technical knockout on tears. Release the hounds! Thereafter, Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the hateful regulars weighed in, labeling Khelif a man in a women’s competition. The always disappointing J.K. Rowling wrote on one fading and failing platform: “Watch this then explain why you’re OK with a man beating a woman in public for your entertainment.”

I hate citing this example and won’t suck up this space and your time with more. Suffice it to say that Khelif was born female, registered female, grew up female and has boxed previously in internationally sanctioned events as a female. Others have stepped up to defend her, including Amy Broadhurst, another Irish boxer who fought and beat Khelif in the World Championships. “Please, the hate has been ridiculous,” Broadhurst wrote.

Too late, really. The anti-trans trolls had their day, a news cycle giving them the oxygen that feeds their flames.

Forty years back I knew an athlete whose situation over-lapped somewhat with Khelif’s, though not exactly analogous and not only because her story didn’t prompt hate speech from past presidents, billionaires and plagiarists.^[ii]  

I’m going to call the athlete I knew Z. I don’t want to put her name out there. People who have known me many years or grew up with me in Toronto’s east end or had a background in high-school basketball or track in the city might be able to piece her ID together. Then again, those most likely to piece it together already know her story, at least in part.

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LET’S dial back to 1983, when I first met Z on a basketball court in the east end when she was 16 and the youngest in a playground pickup game. I was in my 20s and the oldest. She more than held her own in a pick-up game—this wasn’t an elite stuff by any stretch, just a fun-run on the asphalt. She was a regular Joan Havlicek—after an hour played in constant motion at breakneck speed she barely had to catch her breath and always played a heady game. I had heard that she was invited to play in city girls all-star games, a pretty big deal considered her school didn’t have much of a hoops program. I figured that she would land on the radar of U.S. college recruiters, ditto provincial and national programs’, if she transferred to a school with a rep and top coaching. She didn’t seem to have big ambitions that way. It was never her stated goal.

Z told me her cousin was George T, who had been on the East York Collegiate track team back in my day.^[iii] George T would have been a decathlete if high-school athletics in Ontario offered that as an option—it was easy to see that for a guy whose events were the hurdles, pole vault and javelin and could do just about anything more than passably. George T at 16 could pass for 25 or older—he was something more than an early maturer and his voice was so low that it sounded like it came out of his ankles. You could see a family resemblance between Z and her cuz.

I asked Z if she did any other sports and she said hoops was it. She said her immigrant parents weren’t crazy about her playing games at all, old-country values. They weren’t about to pick up the tab to buy her hockey equipment or even a glove for softball or whatever. So long as she had shoes, she could play hoops.