Within Paris’s Salon Des Miroirs, a suitably chosen venue for a sport much in need of self-reflection, a Greek gynaecologist and obstetrician who in his spare time runs the European Boxing Federation stepped forward to explain the difference between a man and a woman.

As Dr Ioannis Filippatos reasoned, after performing hundreds of surgeries and delivering countless babies during a 30-year medical career, “I know who is woman and men.”

There is no doubt the doctor knows his way around female anatomy. Gesturing towards the lower midriff of one sports journalist who wanted to know why women’s boxing found itself at the centre of the most damaging scandal at these Olympic Games, Dr Filippatos said matter-of-factly, “I don’t need an ultrasound to know you have a uterus.”

If this seems a strange thing for a boxing official to say to a journalist at a press conference, you have no idea.

To describe as a shambles Monday’s attempt by the International Boxing Association to present its case that two women boxers, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, shouldn’t be competing in Paris, doesn’t capture the epic folly that unfolded on Monday over three inglorious hours, while browbeaten boxing officials sat at a desk, a Russian overlord appeared above them on a massive Zoom screen and a motley crush of journalists became an angry mob.

By the time it started, everyone had been waiting for an hour and a half inside a long, stifling-hot hall of fading glory, peeling paint and tarnished mirror panels. The 19th century........

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