In the search for answers journalists headed to the salon of mirrors. All they got was smoke. Surreal, shouty, shambolic smoke.

In the midst of the scandal that has rocked the Games, the Russian-led International Boxing Federation (IBA) decided to hold a hastily-arranged press conference at an obscure function room in the French capital.

The aim, presumably, was to fight their corner. To hit back at Olympics bosses who have tried to discredit them on a daily basis.

For it was the IBA, stripped of the right to run boxing here over governance and corruption issues, who decided to disqualify Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting from their World Championships last year, a move that has dominated these Games. The pair are now guaranteed of medals here and a gender row has raged from Paris to Peru. Is this two men boxing against women? The athletes have also been subject to some gruesome online criticism. Trolls aplenty, detail scarce.

When not calling IOC chief Thomas Bach a ‘sodomite’ outspoken Muscavite IBA president Umar Kremlev previously said that the tests showed the pair had elevated levels of testosterone. The body itself has said it was because they unearthed the presence of the male ‘XY chromosome’.

So what exactly was the result? And why were the tests ordered? Were they independently verified?

The IBA had an open goal. But if the net was under the Eiffel Tower, they proceeded to boot the ball towards the Champs Elysees.

In a sign of things to come, the start was delayed by around an hour. At times the translation devices handed out did not work. There were three loud bangs that had those present wondering if they were the victims of a terrorist attack but turned out turned out to be heavy microphone interference.

At the midway point a group of Algerians unfurled a flag in protest and started chanting. Nobody could go to the toilet because it was blocked and there was no air conditioning. The two hours often descended into a slanging match, there were plants in the audience and Kremlev, appearing via videolink, appeared to be on mute the first two times he was approached for comment.

Those were the highlights.

So much was said, often in the form of rant, that it is near impossible to decipher what we learned. But here is an attempt.

Kremlev, surrounded by Russian religious paintings, was his usual boisterous self. He repeated his ‘sodomite’ claim, branded the boxers ‘men’ and bemoaned the fact testers ‘did not check between their legs’.

What was new was the revelation that four boxers had been gender tested at the World Championships in 2022 in Turkey, and that only Khelif and Yu-Ting had returned adverse findings.

Chris Roberts, the IBA’s Wigan-born chief executive who took his role after the tests, said the pair had been allowed to enter in 2023 because a second test was needed for confirmation. He added that Khelif and Yu-Ting were initially allowed to compete – Khelif got as far as the gold medal match before being kicked out – because they had to wait for those test results.