Track’s absurd rule must go
As an elite athlete, Caster Semenya wants her life to go something like this: train hard, run fast and triumphantly step up to the winner’s podium.
But the international governing body for track and field has other ideas. It keeps thrusting the South African runner into the centre of a debate about what defines a woman.
In doing so, the IAAF is trying to paint itself as the protector of fairness in women’s sport. It is anything but. And that should trouble us all.
The issue is testosterone. Not the manufactured kind cheating athletes take, but the hormones that men — and some women, like Semenya — produce naturally. The sport body has set an arbitrary limit on how much natural testosterone a woman can produce and still meet the new “female classification.”
They haven’t created a system that would test every athlete — man or woman — and slot them into competition categories based on their testosterone readings. That would be bad enough. But what they’ve done is far worse.
The only athletes subjected to testing are women. And only women in an absurdly specific subset of races, from 400 metres to 1,500 metres. Those, naturally, cover off all of Semenya’s events.
And, in practice, the women who will be targeted and exposed to a barrage of hateful social media by this system are women who other people (generally male sport administrators) have decided don’t look feminine enough.
This is the same impetus that led to track and field’s longdiscredited naked parades of the 1960s to determine who was a “real woman.”
This latest version of gender testing comes dressed up with medical terms and claims of scientific evidence but it’s no different. It’s still targeting women based on their looks. It’s shameful. It’s discriminatory. And it’s entirely unacceptable. That’s why, last week, an international team — including the Toronto lawyers who successful beat back the IAAF’s previous attempt to do this — took Semenya’s case to the highest authority, the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
This female classification regulation is so discriminatory, and the evidence for its purported need so sketchy, that it’s almost impossible to imagine how the court doesn’t suspend this rule just as it did with the previous one in 2015.
Under the rules adopted in April, the IAAF considers women like Semenya to be female if competing in almost every single track and field event from the 100-metre sprint to hammer throw. But, somehow, she takes on a different gender when running her specialities, the 800 and 1,500 metres.
It would be laughable if it didn’t have the possibility of ending careers and setting a dangerous precedent.
Unless the rule is suspended by the court, Semenya would have to undergo a Kafkaesque type of reverse doping program and take medically unnecessary drugs to suppress the testosterone her body naturally produces.
There’s no doubt the two-time Olympic 800-metre champion is a gifted runner. So was Usain Bolt, who towered over his fellow sprint competitors. And swimmer Michael Phelps, whose wingspan and torso were abnormal and gave him an advantage in the pool. They’re celebrated for what makes them different and there’s no reason Semenya should be treated differently.
Every elite athlete is a combination of the genetics they were born with, the circumstances of their life, and above all — as any coach knows well — a fierce determination to make the most of what they have.
There is no way to boil athletic advantage for a group of women down to a single hormone, no matter how much the IAAF wants to.
“I am a woman and I run fast,” Semenya said in a statement about her appeal to the court. “I just want to run naturally, the way I was born.”
She should be able to. And her fight for that right will help to safeguard the rights of all women.