PARIS − It was her ability to dodge punches from boys that led her to take up boxing.

That's what 24-year-old Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, ensnared in an Olympics controversy surrounding gender eligibility, said earlier this year in an interview with UNICEF. The United Nations' agency had just named Khelif one of its national ambassadors, advocates-at-large for the rights of children.

Khelif said that as a teenager she "excelled" at soccer, though boys in the rural village of Tiaret in western Algeria where she grew up teased and threatened her about it.

Soccer was not a sport for girls, they said.

To her father, a welder who worked away from home in the Sahara Desert, neither was boxing. She didn't tell him when she took the bus each week about six miles away to practice. She did tell her mother, who helped her raise money for the bus fare by selling recycled metal scraps and couscous, the traditional North African dish.

At the time, Khelif was 16.

Three years later, she placed 17th at the 2018 world championships in India. Then she represented Algeria at the 2019 world championships in Russia, where she placed 33rd.

At the Paris Olympics, Khelif is one of two female boxers cleared to compete − the other is Taiwan's Lin Yu-Ting − despite having been disqualified from last year's women's world championships for failing gender eligibility tests, according to the International Boxing Association.

The problem, such as it is, is that the IBA is no longer sanctioned to oversee Olympic boxing and the International Olympic Committee has repeatedly said that based on current rules both fighters do qualify.

"To reiterate, the Algerian boxer was born female, registered female (in her passport) and lived all her life as a female boxer. This is not a transgender case," IOC spokesman Mark Adams said Friday in a press conference, expressing some exasperation over media reports that have suggested otherwise.

IOC President Thomas Bach followed that comment up on Saturday in a press conference, saying "I would like to ask everyone to respect these women, to respect them as women, as human beings. And not to (add to) the confusion some apparently want to create around them," a reference to abusive and inaccurate comments directed at the athletes on social media.

When the IBA disqualified Khelif it did so, it said, because of tests showing elevated levels of testosterone. But the IOC has raised concerns about the veracity of those tests, it's a sport's governing federation not the IOC who decides the rules of the sport and who gets to compete, and the science around sex biology is disputed.

Still, the controversy gained additional traction Thursday night after an Italian boxer, Angela Carini, abandoned her fight against Khelif after taking a punch to the face inside of a minute into the match. The apparent interpretation, from Carini's body language and failure to shake her opponent's hand, was she was upset at Khelif over the eligibility issue.

Carini, 25, apologized on Friday, telling Italian media "all this controversy makes me sad," adding, "I'm sorry for my opponent, too. If the IOC said she can fight, I respect that decision."

She said she was "angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke."

Lin, the second female boxer at the center of gender eligibility criteria, stepped into the ring Friday. Capitalizing on her length and quickness, the 5-foot-10 Lin beat Uzbekistan's Sitora Turdibekova on points by unanimous decision.

Khelif's next opponent is Anna Luca Hamori, a 23-year-old Hungarian fighter.

"I’m not scared," she said Friday.

"I don’t care about the press story and social media. ... It will be a bigger victory for me if I win."

Algeria is a country where opportunities for girls to play sports can be limited by the weight of patriarchal tradition, rather than outright restricted.

Mahfoud Amara, an Algerian-born professor of sports management and policy at Qatar University, said in emailed comments that after his country gained independence from France in 1962 it promoted female participation in physical education and sports as part of its efforts to modernize Algerian society.

Algeria sent its first female athlete to the Olympics in 1984, to the Summer Games in Los Angeles. That athlete was Hassiba Boulmerka, a middle-distance runner, who became the first Arab female athlete to win both an Olympic gold medal and a world championship title. Her success came during a time of political turmoil in Algeria, including a civil war involving secular nationalists and supporters of political Islam, who viewed suspiciously female participation in sports, particularly what they wore, as incompatible with Islamic values.

Since the 1990s, he said, Algerian female athletes have competed in various sports, including athletics, judo and boxing. He said that "resource limitations" affect both male and female sports.

Amara said that amid the outcry in Paris over Khelif's participation Algerians have been rallying behind her because they see it as criticism of her being from an Arab Muslim country, African and from the global south.

"It is worth noting," he said, "that Algerian female athletes have won more Olympic medals for Algeria than their male counterparts. Imane Khelif and other female athletes continue to inspire young girls to join local clubs in track and field, martial arts, boxing and other sports."

In Saturday's press conference, Bach said the online abuse Khelif was receiving was all the more deplorable because she had "made it very clear many times she is standing for the rights of the women in her country."

In the UNICEF interview, conducted in April, Khelif said "many parents" there "are not aware of the benefits of sport and how it can improve not only physical fitness but also mental well-being."

Contributing: Josh Peter

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Imane Khelif started in soccer before becoming Olympic boxer