Mike Tyson famously said, “Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face.”

Angela Carini had a plan. The Italian boxer wanted to go to the Paris Olympics this year and win a medal to honor the memory of her late father. 

Then she got punched in the face by Imane Khelif. Obviously, Carini is one of the top female boxers in the world, and a tough customer, or she would never have made it to the Olympics. 

In the match, she withdrew after 46 seconds and burst into tears of frustration and disappointment. She said she never had been punched so hard in her life.

Khelif and Taiwanese Olympic boxer Lin Yu-ting — each of whom are, as of this writing, progressing to the end of the 2024 Olympic women’s boxing tournament and within rounds of winning a gold medal, traditionally regarded as the honor of the best amateur female boxer in her weight class in the world — were disqualified in 2023 by the International Boxing Association (IBA) for allegedly having XY chromosomes. On Monday, the IBA held a press conference in Paris elaborating on the matter, where the association’s senior governance officials said both Khelif and Yu-ting were administered blood tests by the IBA.

“Our problem,” Dr. Ioannis Filippatos, the former chair of the IBA’s medical committee, said at Monday’s presser, “is that we have two blood exams with karyotype of men. This is the answer from laboratory. This is not my answer. This is answer from laboratory.”

The IBA added it informed the International Olympic Committee of the results.

Not long after the IBA suspended the fighters in 2023 — to which the IBA says Lin chose not to appeal while Khelif initially appealed, but later dropped — the IOC cut ties with the IBA citing questions with the association’s leadership, judging, financial operations and ethics.

Without the IBA as a partner, the IOC created a governing body of its own, the Paris Boxing Unit, to govern the 2024 Olympic boxing competition. The PBU’s bylaws, though, delegate decisions concerning athlete eligibility to individual countries’ national Olympic committees.

The IOC and its president Thomas Bach have, for their part, remained steadfast in Paris explaining the two boxers are, in their eyes, female.

“We have two boxers who are born as women, who have been raised as women, who have passports as women, and who have competed for many years as women,” Bach said. “This is the clear definition of a woman.”

Stay up to speed: Sign up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

Yes, Khelif has lost matches to women over the years. And, yes, Olympic officials, and the media, have delivered long, detailed explanations of what “intersex” means, a condition that affects approximately 1.5% of the world’s population.  

Yet, two Olympic boxers turn up with this condition? Of course, they would not possibly be exploiting this condition to gain an unfair advantage over conventionally female opponents. 

Rule one in communications is if you are late and on defense you are losing. Particularly when competing with a very stark video of the 46-second bout and the sobbing Carini. 

The IOC had a plan to simply let these two “intersex” boxers compete. And then, like Carini, it got punched in the face. It got knocked out in the court of public opinion.

Circumstances such as this, beamed around the world, propel this vitally important public issue out of the political arena and into the conversations of average men and women who don’t care about politics. 

That’s why it’s in the spotlight here in Colorado.

A group of volunteers sponsored a ballot initiative to put into law three categories of school sports: men/boys, women/girls and co-ed/mixed. And the category you play in depends not on your preference, but what your birth certificate says. 

Pretty simple. Up until a few years ago, it was also common sense.

Now, thanks to stark stories of males unfairly competing against women — from local school soccer fields through the top of the collegiate sports pyramid to the Olympics — citizens are energetically working to restore a proper balance. 

Here’s a secret: those who are cool with guys vs. gals know they are losing the argument. And they are scared. They quickly killed a bill in the Colorado legislature this year and they have fought this, and another citizens’ initiative on parents’ rights, at every step. 

Always well-funded, the institutional left deployed the most skilled ballot-issue lawyers in the state to put up roadblocks. While the citizens ultimately won, their ability to start collecting the required 120,000 signatures was delayed.

Why is the left fighting so hard to not even let Coloradans vote?

They might get shellacked.

They know a huge bipartisan majority agrees with the folks pushing this initiative. Polling during the past year by several organizations, including the highly respected Gallup Poll, has consistently shown about 70% of Americans believe women’s sports should be reserved for biological women.  

Advocates for allowing genetic males in women’s sports — or in women’s locker rooms, prisons, dormitories or school restrooms — emphasize the rights of this small minority, and the plight of those individuals, be they transgender, or intersex. They say it’s a non-issue, being exploited for politics.

They are expending a lot of energy, and money, to fight a “non-issue.”

But don’t individual women athletes have rights? It’s far from a non-issue issue if it’s you, or your daughter, or sister who are unfairly beaten at sports. Or who would prefer not to dress, or shower, with genetic males.

This is a Colorado conversation worth having. 

Sean Duffy, a former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Bill Owens, is a communications and media relations strategist and ghostwriter based in the Denver area.