Duo’s double gold joy Roberts on transgender ban
BUDAPEST - Canadian women celebrated double gold at the swimming world championships yesterday with 15-year-old Summer McIntosh claiming the 200m butterfly and Kylie Masse clinching the 50m backstroke.
Romania’s David Popovici continued his impressive championships, winning the 100m freestyle to add to his 200m gold while France’s Leon Marchand clinched the medley double with victory in the 200m medley.
McIntosh won with a time of 2:05.20, beating American Hali Flickinger by 0.88 seconds and the Canadian’s time was a new junior world record and added to her silver medal in the 400m freestyle. China’s Yufei Zhang took the bronze medal. The Toronto-born swimmer was the youngest member of Canada’s Olympic team in Tokyo where she finished fourth in the women’s 400m freestyle.
“I didn’t expect to go 2:05,” McIntosh said. “But as soon as I stepped out with all the energy and excitement from the crowd, I just fed off that. I got a lot of adrenaline and motivation and put it down.”
Masse was then first to touch in the 50m backstroke, beating American Katharine Berkoff by eight hundredths of a second with France’s Analia Pigree taking bronze.
SYDNEY - Ian Roberts, the first elite rugby league player to come out as gay, condemned the sport’s decision to ban transgender players from women’s internationals as a setback for tolerance and inclusion in the broader community.
The International Rugby League (IRL) said on Tuesday that “male-to-female” transgender athletes would be barred from women’s international competition until further notice as it conducts further research to finalise a formal policy.
The IRL’s ruling follows global swimming’s decision on Sunday to restrict transgender athletes from elite women’s competition and to look at setting up “open” categories for transgender competition.
Former Australian rugby league international Roberts, who came out in 1995, told Reuters the IRL’s decision was “disappointing” and could potentially drive transgender athletes away from sport.
“As a community I thought we had progressed past this and we had matured
RUGBY
enough to understand this and accept every person’s right to be who they are and live their honest self, live their truthful self,” he told Reuters in an interview.
“I do think there needs to be a conversation about this and how they reached that decision — and the reasons they reached that decision.