Seb Coe could be the saviour of women’s sport – and put an end to the ridiculous gender rows

International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach and World Athletics president Sebastian Coe attend the women's marathon victory ceremony at the Stade de France
International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said these were the first Olympics with 'with full gender parity' - Phil Noble/REUTERS

There was a collective eye-roll from anyone listening to Thomas Bach’s speech at the closing Olympics ceremony. He described the Paris games as “younger, more inclusive, more sustainable. The first ever Olympic Games with full gender parity”. What does this mean? Equal numbers of male and female athletes? Well yes, if you count certain men as women I suppose.

After this disastrous oversight, crashingly disingenuous given the shadow cast by the boxing gender row, he then went on to make the worst pun in the world by saying that they were “Seine-sational Games”. Let’s forget about the Seine being full of E. coli for now.

But no one was there for the interminable speeches. What matters now is how we go forward.

There have been some fantastic moments over the last couple of weeks. Simone Biles being superhuman. Armand Duplantis in the pole vault and the other well-endowed chappie. The mens’ 100m final. The tears of Andy Murray. Discovering the brilliant skills of relatively new sports like BMX and skateboarding; being mesmerised by synchronised swimming. And my favourite, the lunatic Australian “breakdancer” who had a bad turn (and scored zero).

There were, however, the less good bits. The horrible horse whipping, the failed dope tests. But all of this was overshadowed by Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting winning gold medals when both had been deemed ineligible for the women’s category.

As a result, Paris 2024 will live long in the memory for giving us the horrible sight of biologically male boxers punching women and robbing medals from them .

The row continues with more information coming to light – now her coach, Georges Cazorla, has said that the tests identified “a problem with hormones” and “with chromosomes”. So the news that Thomas Bach is resigning from his role as president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is welcome.

But Bach is just one of a parade of inadequate men, which includes supine sports presenters and Mark Adams, an IOC spokesperson (and Keir Starmer’s friend), talking absolute nonsense. Sometimes it seems that men only listen to other powerful men.

The intricacies of the row between the IOC and the Internal Boxing Association (IBA) will have been lost on most people. Seemingly in the name of “inclusion” (which it says should be the “default criteria”), the IOC had overruled the findings of chromosomal tests that had prompted the IBA to ban these boxers.

All of this apparently was a conspiracy financed by Russian state-owned Gazprom (which, as an IBA sponsor, admittedly muddied the waters). All that was needed to be proved female was a female passport. No more invasive tests like the bad old days! Again, this is arrant nonsense when DNA can be picked up in a cheek swab and most athletes have to give regular urine samples anyway (or have pregnancy tests).

A few brave souls spoke out, at first in code. Seb Coe said: “I did five years on the British Boxing Board of Control as an administrative steward, and I have daughters. How do you think I feel about this?”

All the while, Bach was adding to the muddle by saying, “This is not a DSD [differences in sex development] case”. This then had to be corrected saying that what he meant to say was, “This is not a transgender case”.

This would be almost funny if it didn’t involve women getting smacked in the face. Or that the whole integrity of women’s sports has been brought into question by these ill-informed men. Either they are ill-informed or they are so keen on “inclusivity” that all notions of fairness go out of the window.

None of these arguments are new, they are about the relevance of biology. Women who insist that biology trumps gender identity (whatever that is) have been pilloried for years. But the reasons we have insisted on this are now clear. I hope the horrible images coming out of these boxing matches – bloodied women, smirking men – stay with us.

Athletes like Sharron Davies and Martina Navratilova have been warriors about preserving women’s sports. The wonderful Dr Emma Hilton has explained, without rancour, what DSDs actually mean. Bodies fight bodies. Passports don’t fight passports and all sports categorise bodies by weight and ability and advantage. A woman is not a man with suppressed testosterone levels.

Coe has hinted he will now put himself forward for the IOC presidency saying “I have a responsibility to preserve the female category. And I will go on doing that until a successor decides otherwise or the science alters.”

Hallelujah! There has been so much disinformation and a refusal to understand what has happened here.

Accusations of racism have hit anyone questioning Khelif and Yu-Ting’s sex. But think back to the 2020 Olympics and the weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who transitioned in her thirties.

I wrote then that Hubbard, who crashed out, had taken the place of the 18-year-old Roviel Detenamo, and that male puberty had given Hubbard an unfair advantage.

Nor is this about the idea of Westernised femininity. Our powerlifters, shot putters and boxers look how they look, and good for them. I remember the abuse that the magnificent Fatima Whitbread got.

But at last, men and women have put their heads above the parapet and said this cannot go on. Thank you, Oliver Brown, in this paper especially.

We should not need a Seb Coe to ride to the rescue. But the fact is that in all realms of public life we need those prepared to say biological sex matters. That should not be controversial!

The IOC has let women down. It has been weak, flabby and self-congratulatory in its ignorance and it needs new leadership. Whoever it is requires ovaries of steel – or at least someone who recognises that such things matter.