Canadian Olympic relay team gesture unrelated to gender row
- Published on August 16, 2024 at 16:36
- 4 min read
- By Gwen ROLEY, AFP Canada
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"Team Canada runners show their support for Female Athletes who are having their sports taken over by cheating men," says the caption of an August 9, 2024 X video.
Similar claims spread across X and Facebook alongside videos of the Canadian men's 4x100m relay team crossing their arms before the August 9 Olympic final in which they won the gold medal.
Away from the track, the 2024 Olympics boxing events were embroiled in a controversy over Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting and Algeria's Imane Khelif, who both competed despite being expelled from the 2023 World Championships after the International Boxing Association (IBA) alleged they failed to meet unspecified gender requirements to compete in the women's category.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) maintained the boxers' eligibility for the Games since Lin and Khelif have always competed as women and have "female" listed on their passports. However, many expressed discontent that the two boxers were allowed to participate following unfounded online claims that both athletes were transgender.
Two of Lin's competitors made an X symbol with their fingers after she defeated them in the boxing ring, but did not comment on the gesture.
After one of those boxers, Bulgaria's Svetlana Staneva, crossed her fingers following her bout with Lin, her coach Borislav Georgiev held up a piece of paper with the words: "I'm XX. Save woman sport." In most cases, males have both an X and Y chromosome, while females have two X chromosomes.
While some social media users shared the video of the Canadian 4x100m gold medalists with the caption "#XX," alluding to the gender row, the gesture before the race was not meant as a political statement.
"It has nothing to do with any protest of any kind," Athletics Canada said in an August 14 email.
The governing body said the relay team had crossed their arms before races for years. Brian Levine, manager and agent of the team's anchor Andre De Grasse, told AFP some of Canada's previous runners passed down the move.
"It was a tradition that was started by the team before them -- members of the old sort of team -- and they just stuck with it," Levine said August 15.
Videos of previous international 4x100m relay races show members of the Canadian men's team making the same gesture, including at the Rio 2016 Olympic final and the final of the 2022 World Athletics Championships (archived here, here and here).
Two other members of the Canadian relay team in Paris, Jerome Blake and Aaron Brown, did not mention the boxing gender controversy in interviews with Canadian media after their Olympic victory.
Other athletes also sometimes cross their arms before competing.
In what she called a sign of solidarity with "oppressed people," American shot putter Raven Saunders made an X symbol over her head on the podium after winning a silver medal at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
Read more of AFP's reporting on misinformation in Canada here.
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