A trans-identified male is reportedly aiming to compete in women’s boxing at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games. Alice Linn, formerly known as Sebastian, once kneed a female boxer in the stomach with so much force that she had to immediately quit the match.
Linn, 29, first began Thai boxing under his birth name at the Vikings Muay Thai boxing club in Marnheim, Germany in 2018, and began self-identifying as a woman one year later. In a 2021 interview with Rheinpfalz, Linn reported that he had “aggression issues” and violent tendencies as a child.
During the interview, Muay Thai Vikings chairman Marc Wagner praised Linn and called him “very special.” Wagner took Linn under his wing to train him to compete against women, and the two are now aiming to have Linn compete for Germany in women’s boxing at the 2028 Olympic Games.
“Every competitive athlete needs something to work towards. Training and sparring are great, but at some point you want a real fight,” Wagner told Rheinpfalz.
Linn is specialized in Muay Thai – a combat sport which allows for elbow strikes, knee kicks and clinches, making it particularly aggressive. But despite the full-contact nature of the sport, Wagner has repeatedly tried to arrange matches pitting Linn against female competitors. While several of these fights have been organized, most of the female competitors have dropped out after discovering that Linn is a biological male.
However, one such match did proceed in November of 2021. In the first round, Linn kicked the female competitor in the stomach with so much force that she doubled over in pain and immediately forfeited the match. Vikings chairman Wagner reportedly called the forfeit “less than ideal” because he feared it would discourage other women from fighting against Linn and make it more difficult for Linn to compete against women in later events.
In a recent interview with Sportschau, Wagner insisted that Linn had no physical advantages over female boxers, and emphasized that Linn was simply “psychologically” stronger thanks to his training. Wagner has repeatedly expressed that his desire to see Linn through to the Olympics was partly due to his own desire to become an Olympic coach.
News of Linn’s intention to compete in women’s boxing at the 2028 Olympics comes on the heels of a chaotic Olympic summer in Paris involving two biologically male boxers who took home gold in the women’s category.
As first broken by Reduxx, boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting competed as “women” at the 2024 Olympic Games despite being previously disqualified from a women’s boxing championship because they failed to demonstrate they had female chromosomes. The news caused a global scandal and sparked a heated discussion on fairness in women’s sport.
In the midst of the controversy, the German President of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, said during a press conference that there was no scientific method to determine who is a man and who is a woman.
According to current Olympic guidelines, athletes only need to have a “female” sex marker on their legal documents in order to be permitted to compete in the women’s category.
Thomas Bach announced his retirement after the Paris Olympics and Sebastian Coe, the most promising candidate as the next President of the International Olympic Committee, gave an interview shortly before Imane Khelif’s victory regarding the protection of women’s sports.
“If you don’t do that, no woman will ever win a sporting event again,” he said, adding: “[we must] preserve the women’s category.” However, it is unknown if Coe or any of his Olympic associates have any intentions to re-introduce sex testing to the Olympics, a practice that was banned in 1999.