Algerian girls take up boxing after Khelif’s Olympic gold

AZAZGA, Algeria: In a gym in northern Algeria´s Kabylia, 15-year-old Cerine Kessal was driving her fists into a punching bag. The two-time national champion was dreaming of greater feats after Algerian Imane Khelif won Olympic gold last year.

Khelif´s victory generated newfound interest among Algerian girls and women in the male-dominated sport, with gyms across the North African country witnessing a surge in memberships.

She had emerged from the Paris Olympics as a trailblazer for aspiring women athletes in Algeria, despite a gender controversy over her eligibility. “I want to compete in African and world championships,” Kessal said, speaking in a blend of Arabic, French and Tamazight, the language of the Amazigh people, also known as Berbers.

Her coach, Djaafar Ourhoun, said Khelif had become “a role model for the other boxers at the gym”, after winning her local club, Jeunesse Sportive Azazga, its only medal at a recent national championship.

The small gym, refashioned from a former municipal slaughterhouse with the help of local families, now trains 20 women boxers, said Ourhoun. The young girls´ “hunger for results” has often sparked “competitiveness, even jealousy, among their male counterparts,” he said.

“I want to be like Imane Khelif and win an Olympic gold medal,” said Kessal. In 2023, the International Boxing Association barred Khelif from its world championships after it said she had failed gender eligibility tests for carrying XY chromosomes. The 25-year-old champion denounced the IBA´s “false and offensive” allegations and vowed last month to keep fighting “in the ring” and “in the courts”. “I have seen adversity before,” she said in a statement, “but I have never stayed down”.

In Bejaia, further east of Algiers, clubs such as Dream Team and Sidi Ayad Boxing Club have also welcomed more women and girls. Lina Debbou, a former boxer and now sports adviser, said this momentum started right after the Olympics.

“Imane Khelif brought so much to women´s boxing,” she told AFP. “More girls are joining the sport thanks to her.” Even in relatively more conservative parts of the country, like Djelfa in the Saharan Atlas range some 300 kilometres south of Algiers, more women are said to have taken up the sport. “We first tried introducing women´s boxing in 2006, but it was not successful due to the region being conservative,” Mohamed Benyacoub, the director of local club Ennasr, told AFP.

Now, “the women´s sports movement began to revive,” he said, adding that Khelif had “shattered the taboo that women can´t box”. Nacim Touami, a boxing referee whose wife is also a professional boxer, said parents are playing a pivotal role in this “real obsession with boxing now”.

“Parents used to prefer volleyball or swimming for their daughters,” he said. “But after Khelif´s gold medal, we´ve seen a real shift.” Manel Berkache, a former national champion who also coaches at JSA, said it was mothers, in particular, who were driving the change.

“Mothers are now the ones who register their daughters and attend training and matches, and this is a beautiful thing,” she said. Hocine Oucherif, vice-president of the Algerian Boxing Federation, called this “the Imane Khelif phenomenon”. “She is the locomotive of women´s boxing in Algeria,” he said. “She gave us a strong momentum.”

He said over 100 junior girl boxers had turned up at this year´s national championship -- more than double the number from last year. It was at this competition that Kessal won gold, sparring against athletes from clubs including the Tiaret Civil Protection Club where Khelif debuted. Like Kessal, 14-year-old Hayat Berouali, who picked up boxing less than a month ago, dreams of becoming a champion, too.