Algeria’s Imane Khelif (pictured) defeated China’s world welterweight champion, Yang Liu by a unanimous decision to make history as Africa’s first ever female boxer to win an Olympic gold medal and the first one also to scoop a medal in the Olympic Games.
Cheered by a large Algerian crowd chanting “Allez Imane” at the Roland-Garros Stadium, Imane won the nod of all the five judges who scored 10-9 in each round.
She becomes Algeria’s second boxer to win Olympic gold after Hocine Soltani at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
Imane’s gold is the ninth one for Africa in the Olympics after the eighth one by her compatriot Soltani and the seventh African gold by Kenya’s Robert ‘Aruba’ Wangila in the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Wangila is Africa’s first ever black boxer to win Olympic gold. The other six gold medals came from white South African boxers during the apartheid era.
Credit: AFBC Communications
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