Nearly one year after Sam Ponder was fired from ESPN, the former NFL Countdown host addressed her departure and its possible connection to last summer’s Olympic boxing controversy.
ESPN made the surprising decision to part ways with Robert Griffin III and Ponder last August, just a few weeks before the NFL season kicked off. For Ponder, the firing came one week after she made a social media post about Imane Khelif amid controversy surrounding the Algerian Olympic boxer’s gender.
ENOUGH is what all of us should be saying!! Proud of this woman 👏🏼💪🏼 https://t.co/C23l9Sn2js
— Samantha Steele Ponder (@samponder) August 1, 2024
“ENOUGH is what all of us should be saying!!” Ponder wrote. One week later, Ponder was let go by ESPN and one year later, she joined her former colleague Sage Steele to discuss the exit.
“I knew when I sent that … this isn’t going to go over very well. But to me, that’s abuse.”@samponder didn’t stay silent when a female boxer was being physically beaten by a biological male in the ring. She tweeted: “Enough.” Within a week, the call came from her bosses at… pic.twitter.com/JN6QZH1esO
— Sage Steele (@sagesteele) July 16, 2025
“I knew when I sent that it wasn’t going to go over well,” Ponder told Steele of her post about Khelif. “But like, to me, that’s abuse. You have a male in a boxing ring with a female, literally beating her and we’re just supposed to like, ‘yay’ in the name of inclusion. Like, no. What about her?”
During the 2024 Summer Olympics, Khelif was accused of being transgender on social media after Italian boxer Angela Carini forfeited their match just 46 seconds into the first round. Khelif is listed as a female on her birth certificate and passport from Algeria, where it is illegal to be transgender.
In May, World Boxing, the International Olympic Committee-sanctioned boxing governing body mandated genetic testing for all fighters. Shortly after the mandate, a leaked medical report again questioned Khelif’s gender. If authentic, the leaked report would show Khelif was found to have XY chromosomes in a 2023 test. The new mandate means Khelif must be tested before boxing again.
“So, I sent it,” Ponder said of her Aug. 2024 social media post. “And the next week, got a text that said, ‘Can you jump on a call with this person and this person in like an hour.’ And one of the bosses is someone I never hear from, and I was like, ‘This is it.’ But I do want to say, to be sure, I do not believe, nor have I ever believed that I was solely fired for this. I think the model of my career at that point, of only working Sundays in the fall on Countdown was not what ESPN wanted and they felt like they were paying me too much money to do just one thing.”
Ponder acknowledged she previously turned down opportunities to do other things for ESPN because of the stage of life she’s in. With three young children at home, Ponder didn’t want to trade time with her family for more work.
“I really don’t think me losing my job was solely because of that,” Ponder continued of her comment about Khelif. “But the timing of it? Almost certainly was. And I was told after the fact, privately, that most people at the top of the company did agree with me on this issue, but there is a loud activist group at Disney, and they were not happy with me.”
In the wake of her firing, many have accused ESPN of parting ways with Ponder because of her post about Khelif. But Ponder was not the only ESPN personality to speak out during the Olympic boxing controversy. Dan Orlovsky posted “protect our daughters” before deleting the message amid the social media firestorm that initially surrounded Khelif. Pat McAfee alleged Khelif was “deemed a male” while admitting he hadn’t researched the topic. And Kirk Herbstreit reduced the topic of transgender athletes to men playing in women’s sports.
Orlovsky, McAfee and Herbstreit are still ESPN personalities, which goes against the theory that Ponder was fired for her post about Khelif. The timing of ESPN deciding to part ways with Ponder surprised everyone. But that surprise was more about the fact that it occurred so close to the start of the NFL season.