Caster showed she’s a true Olympian
SO THE Olympics have come and gone for another four years. As you sit twiddling your remote and fighting the withdrawal symptoms, I wonder what your overarching memory will be? There was, as always, a huge scope to choose from.
For me it was all about Caster Semenya. Not in the way that she won as expected, but in the sportsmanship, grace and general decency she exhibited throughout.
As the day for her moment on the track drew nearer, so the bile of the trolls began to crescendo: the quacks, the pseudo-scientists jumping on the bandwagon about her hyperandrogenism, rabbiting on about unfair competition, even though the sport’s ruling body, the IAAF, had cleared this before the games even began.
The row seemed to be predicated on two things; as if this was Caster’s fault, like the East German lab rat athletes of yore pumped full of steroids. If that approach failed, the argument seemed to be that all she had to do was pitch up on race day, lace up her spikes, run and win.
Semenya didn’t ask to be born with the natural advantage she has, any more than Michael Phelps asked to be born with monstrous flipper-like feet and albatross arms – which could have left him with few options outside of shelf packing in supermarket aisles, until he learnt to swim.
There are other athletes too who seem to be born with natural advantages; freakishly tall basketball players who don’t even look as if they have to jump for the net, dainty bird-like gymnasts who look smaller than 10-year-olds and twice as supple. While we’re at it, we may as well start complaining about the All Blacks, because no one can beat them either – especially not us anytime soon, sadly.
Nobody points fingers at any of them though. It took years in fact for organised sport and all the embedded officials and hacks to turn on dopers like Lance Armstrong – or even a large chunk of the Russian team in Rio, if the reports are anything to go by, who were still allowed to compete.
There seems to be a different set of rules when it comes to us. Take Oscar Pistorius (before he murdered Reeva Steenkamp) and the bizarre furore that he was greeted with when he finally won the right to compete as an able-bodied athlete only to find himself having to disprove the belief that his blades – his artificial legs – gave him an unfair advantage over athletes who had real legs.
After the appalling invasion of Semenya’s privacy and the incredible global public humiliation that has swirled around her and engulfed the athlete since her first senior triumph in Berlin in the 2009 World Championships, any lesser person would have headed for the remote Kakamas and lived a life of wi-fi-free solitude.
Not her, she bounced back and answered her critics on the track. Anything she had to say in Rio was delivered with grace and poise, never descending to the level of the trolls.
And, after Semenya won gold in Rio, she turned to two of her competitors to console them. They, may their names live on in infamy, spurned her. One of them: Scottish athlete Lynsey Sharp bemoaned how racing against Semenya was pointless, such was our athlete’s advantage.
“I have tried to avoid the issue all year,” she said between sobs, afterwards.
So, why raise it at all? And why after being soundly beaten into sixth place? As it is, she would have come in fifth had Semenya not run. Why not pick on the other runners in the race, like Burundi’s Francine Niyonsaba, who took silver, and Kenya’s Margaret Wambui, who won bronze in third.
As it was we didn’t need Sharp to remind us the top three runners were African. In a mind-blowingly racist outburst Polish runner Joanna Jozwik, who ended fifth, declared herself the silver medallist; the first European and the second white in the race – the other white was fourth-placed Canadian Melissa Bishop. There aren’t words are there, really? In one swoop Jozwik managed to reduce Rio 2016 to a Bondelsport competition at Orania and make Steve Hofmeyr look like Nelson Mandela.
As the sage of the Free State, Jonathan Jansen, opined on Facebook on Sunday: “Dear Caster, you are the only Olympian who had to run two races. One against world-class opposition, and another against world-wide prejudice.”
But it was that very prejudice that galvanised South Africans behind her as US Ambassador to South Africa Patrick Gaspard tweeted: “Of all the social media campaigns in my time in SA, the one that best shows character of nation is #Hands OffCaster.”
Lest we forget, it was that very same social media that sparked off that incredible tsunami of race hate that seems so far away now, but only erupted in January with Penny Sparrow on Facebook. It was the same social media that fed upon itself, over and over again, whipping itself like a dervish into a froth that sent most of us scurrying for the comfort of our laagers and the warmth of our proven prejudices, while a minority stood by and wondered what the hell had just happened and why.
Last week, though, social media showed what it could do for good and, let’s be honest, the trolling was sublime, from the memes to the tweets, with my favourite being the one by @MapsMaponyane: Dear Lynsey Sharp, You can’t be mediocre your whole life. Be better. Sincerely yours, South Africa
On Sunday night, Caster carried the flag at the closing ceremony of the Games as she had every right to.
She reminded us all of the spirit of the Olympics: generosity of spirit, triumph over adversity, ubuntu and in the process showed up her detractors for exactly what they were – not worthy of running alongside her in the race of life.