Michele Tafoya On Angela Carini Withdrawing From Olympic Boxing Match: 'This Might've Opened The Floodgates'
Former NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya joins Fox Across America to give her take on Algerian boxer Imane Khelif forcing Italy's Angela Carini to quit after just 46 seconds during a match at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Do you enjoy watching men beating up women? I don’t. Any exceptions? Not that I can think of.
But the International Olympics Committee have decided otherwise. Watching men beating up women is fine so long as it’s in a huge stadium and televised for all the world to see. Got it?
I am referring, of course, to the boxing-ring bout in Paris Thursday, where the female Italian athlete Angela Carini was pitted against an opponent named Imane Khelif.
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In the past, Khelif has been deemed to be "biologically male." That is as a bloke, a dude, a man, a fella. All those terms that we used to know how to use, but which seem to have become so complicated suddenly.
Last year, Khelif was disqualified from the world championships after failing testosterone tests. It seems he was found to have higher levels of testosterone than is quite normal for a woman.
But that doesn’t seem to have been a problem for the IOC. Which perhaps isn’t surprising at an Olympics which started with an opening ceremony focused on a bizarre veneration of bearded ladies and balls-out drag-queens.
For years, campaigners and female athletes have warned about the presence of biological men in women’s sports. In recent years, this has covered almost every known field.
A side-by-side of Angela Carini of Team Italy and Imane Khelif of Team Algeria at the Olympic Games on August 01, 2024, in Paris, France. (Getty Images)
Some of these cases have made national news — like the case of William (renamed Lia) Thomas who has for the last five years been competing as a woman, despite being born a man.
When female athletes have complained about this they’ve rarely got any sympathy. When one of the women who competed against Thomas — Riley Gaines — spoke out, she was deluged with hate.
When Gaines spoke at UC Davis last year she was confronted by a mob of "trans-rights" activists who broke glass, graffitied buildings and assaulted people. Which is a nice way to show how much you hate women. Though remember these protestors are all part of the "love is love" brigade. Naturally.
Still, it is striking how little sympathy these actual women have got. And how often they have been made into the controversial ones. Instead of people standing up for their rights and for the right to say things that absolutely everybody said until about five years ago.
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Young women who have worked all hours to get to their peak performance capability have kept having their dreams dashed. Time and again, they took the silver or bronze medal or missed the podium altogether.
Still, it’s all "progress" isn’t it?
Unsurprisingly, it was the more violent sports that first alerted some people to the fact that there was a real problem here.
It is more than a decade now since my friend Joe Rogan noticed something was up. Because he is into MMA in a big way, he was one of the people who noticed what happened when "Fallon Fox" entered the amateur women’s cage-fighting and did very well indeed.
Algeria's Imane Khelif (in red) punches Italy's Angela Carini in the women's 66kg preliminaries round of 16 boxing match during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the North Paris Arena, in Villepinte on August 1, 2024. (MOHD RASFAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Fox had been born a man, had been in the Navy and then worked as a trucker to save the money to go through surgical procedures to resemble a woman. But once Fox was in the ring with a biological female Fox smacked them around to kingdom come. Some of the MMA people said "fair enough."
Others, like Rogan, pointed out that even if you’ve cut your c–k off, someone who has developed as a man has all the advantages that come with it.
Like bone structure, hand size, shoulder strength.
It took a while for other sports to catch up with this reality. The only reason that Thomas (an unexceptional swimmer when competing as a man) was able to do so well in the women’s qualifiers was because Thomas has all the benefits of male shoulders and much more.
Still there is a crowd of people — not large in size but damn noisy in volume — who will scream "bigot" at anyone stating this. It gets harder all the time.
With every day even Google, Wikipedia and other online sources try to rewrite the past, erasing the real names of people who have "transitioned" and pretending that they were always a woman.
Or that at the most the person had been "assigned male at birth." As though this was the act of a bigoted and ignorant doctor who just wanted to screw with the certification procedure.
Well, in Paris yesterday, we saw the illogical and evil endpoint of all this.
Angela Carini of Team Italy reacts after abandoning the Womens 66kg preliminary round match against Imane Khelif of Team Algeria in the first round on day six of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 at North Paris Arena on August 01, 2024, in Paris, France. (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)
Angela Carini, who has trained hard for years, managed just 46 seconds in the ring opposite Imane Khelif. The "fight" consisted of Khelif punching Carini hard in the face — twice. It was unclear at first if the Italian’s nose had been broken.
Clearly in agony, Carini shouted "This is unjust." As the ref tried to make her shake hands with the "victorious" Khelif, Carini rightly refused.
Many people around the world — especially in Carini´s native Italy — have been outraged by yesterday’s events. But the IOC doesn’t seem to mind.
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Who knows if or when this madness might end. But for anyone who thinks this is good, just remember: there are prisons all over the land with men in them who’ve beaten up women. You may get away with excusing this in plain sight today. But you won’t forever.
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