Bishop gears up for 800m struggle
Canadian runner won silver at the last world championships
LONDON— Two times around the track has always made for one of the hardest events in athletics. But lately the women’s 800metres seems to be the event that no one can really win, on or off the track.
For top runners like Canada’s Melissa Bishop, the struggle is trying to find a way to get across the finish line ahead of South Africa’s Caster Semenya.
And for Semenya, the struggle comes after she crosses that line first because no matter how fast she runs, she can’t outrun the gender controversy that overshadows all her wins and still threatens her very right to compete.
Here at the athletics world championships all the top competitors that would be expected in Sunday’s final made it through Thursday night’s heats easily.
Even Bishop, who had to contend with a scary stumbling moment after being clipped from behind in the first lap, still made qualifying look easy.
“It’s more mental than physical, it’s just staying calm, OK I didn’t go down, just keep rolling,” the 29-year-old from Eganville, Ont., said afterwards.
Bishop won silver at the world championships two years ago, which also marks the last time that Semenya has been beaten at this distance.
Semenya was just 18 years old when she first ran spectacularly to win the 800 metres at the 2009 championships in Berlin but instead of being celebrated she was subjected to humiliating gender testing.
Since then, Semenya has remained the poster girl for women whose bodies naturally produce high levels of testosterone, because she doesn’t have a traditionally feminine look and she’s been so dominant in her event over the last two years.
But the real face of this battle — which is currently before the international sport court — is someone quite different.
Dutee Chand, a petite sprinter from India, who did not advance out of the first round in the 100 here, is the one fighting the international track federation’s attempts to force women like her with hyperandrogenism to undergo medically unnecessary surgery or take hormone therapy to reduce the amount of testosterone their bodies produce in order to compete.
With the help of a team of supporters, including pro-bono lawyer James Bunting, of Toronto’s Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg, Chand is fighting for her right — and by extension, everyone else’s — to compete in the body she was born with.
In 2015, she won a round when the Court of Arbitration for Sport determined the IAAF’s policy, which set standard for testosterone — above 10 nanomoles per litre and women were considered male and barred from competition until they had surgery or hormone therapy to reduce their levels — was discriminatory and lacked scientific evidence.
It gave them two years to come back with scientific proof for their rule and set it aside until then.
That’s what’s happening right now. The IAAF — the international governing body for track and field — has until the end of September to produce their proof.
They started to do that publicly last month with a release titled: “Levelling the playing field in female sport.”
The sport federation commissioned and financed a study that will form part of its evidence in court. The published paper examined testosterone levels from athletes at the 2011 and 2013 world championships and concluded that high testosterone levels can provide an advantage but only in certain events and to a varying degree.
Paradoxically, for the IAAF, there were no advantages highlighted for Chand’s event, the sprints, and the 800 metres had the lowest advantage just 1.78 per cent and hammer throw the greatest at 4.53 per cent.
In sport where fractions of second make the difference between finishing on the podium and off it, slight advantages can be significant but those identified in the paper fall far below the 10 to 12 per cent that’s generally recognized as the performance difference between men and women — a figure the sport court mentioned in its original ruling.
Chand intends to continue the fight in court to keep the IAAF from reviving its suspended hyperandrogenism regulations, her team has said.
“The paper that has been published recently by IAAF doctors does not change in any way Dutee’s view that the regulation is unnecessary and not justifiable.”
For now, Chand is the only one speaking about this.
“My business is to train hard and see what I can come up with in competition,” Semenya said here after she won bronze in the 1,500 metres earlier this week.
“These are the things we have been seeing since 2009, sometimes you get annoyed, but like I said I focus more on being healthy and doing better.” That’s Bishop’s plan, too. “I’ll let the courts handle it, we’ve got to keep doing our job and continue competing,” she said after the paper came out.