Semenya’s grave injustice
THE JAMAICA Athletics Administrative Association (JAAA) hasn’t, we noticed, taken a public position on the Court of Arbitration for Sports’ (CAS) ruling that would require Caster Semenya, and other female athletes with her form of hyperandrogenism , to reduce their testosterone levels, before being allowed to participate in middle-distance races, from 800 metres to 1,500 metres.
Hopefully, the JAAA’s silence isn’t because the association is comfortable with this endorsement of the IAAF’s limit on the maximum amount of naturally produced testosterone that such runners should have in their bodies. For not only is the action, as CAS conceded, discriminatory, it represents an intrusion against a natural advantage, an extension of which may be difficult to contain. Jamaica and its athletes may, in the future, be the ones who are subject to discrimination.
The positive on this ruling, however, if it can be determined to be such, is that it was not unanimous, which should strengthen the possibility of its appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal for being incompatible with public policy. That is a move which should be considered by Ms Semenya and Athletics South Africa, which should receive, at a minimum, strong moral support from JAAA.
TESTOSTERONE LEVELS
Testosterone affects the lean body mass of individuals, thereby having an impact on their strength. Males, generally, have more than females. Indeed, the ‘normal’ testosterone level in women, as was common ground in the evidence adduced at the CAS hearings, ranges between 0.6 to 1.68 nanomoles per litre of blood. For men, the range is 7.7 and 29.4 nmol/L. But in women, like Ms Semenya, with certain sex development disorders, their testosterone levels may be higher than what occurs in the female population.
The regulation the IAAF is now imposing will place a cap of 5nmol/L on the naturally occurring levels in female athletes who wish to compete in the specified races. This suggests that Ms Semenya’s testosterone level is above the new legal limit. She, and others like her, would therefore have to use medication, such as, the CAS majority noted, “traditional oral contraceptives”, to meet the new standards.
Said the executive summary of the CAS ruling: “Having carefully considered the expert evidence, the majority of the panel concludes that androgensensitive female athletes with 46, XY DSD enjoy a significant performance advantage over other female athletes without such DSD, and that this advantage is attributable to their exposure to levels of circulating testosterone in the normal adult male range, rather than the normal adult female range.”
There are serious questions, though, about how far we should go to reduce natural advantages in cases such as this. While Ms Semenya has dominated the 800-metre race for the last decade, she doesn’t have the record in the event. In fact, her fastest time, 1:54.25, run in Paris last June, made her only the fourth-fastest woman in the event in history. She remains well behind the world record of 1:53.28, set in 1983 by Jarmila Kratochvilova of the former Czechoslovakia.
Indeed, Ms Semenya’s fastest time for the distance pales in comparison to the 25th fastest by a man, 1:42.81 by Burundi’s Jean-Patrick Nduwimana in 2001. On the face of it, while a freak event of nature gives her an advantage over other women, Ms Semenya appears not to be in the realm of elite male athletes.
Further, having moved to protect “one group of individuals against having to compete against individuals who possess certain insuperable performance advantages derived from biology rather than legal status”, as CAS argues is the effect of the majority’s decision, where next will such intrusions go? Fasttwitch muscles?
Suppose science could determine the biological secret of Usain Bolt’s genius, which might have marked him, and perhaps a handful of others, for advantage over other athletes, it might have been argued that he was fair game for handicapping. Perchance a male athlete is discovered with superior fast-twitch muscles and produces a substantially higher level of testosterone than the normal male, would he be subjected to a Semenya-type ruling?