Caster still on that hill, far from a level playing field
Behind a rugby field at the University of Pretoria, there is a small hill. It is not much of a hill. It’s more of a big mound of earth. This is “Caster’s Hill”, where a teenage Caster Semenya built the physical endurance that would make her an 800m superstar.
Michael “Sponge” Seme, a coach at the University of Pretoria, saw talent in Semenya more than a decade ago. She was strong from playing football, but she would tail away in the final lap of the 800m, fading badly behind the field in the last 400m.
Seme knew if Semenya could maintain that strength through to the end, she would be a special athlete. At 4am and 5pm every day, Semenya would run up and down that hill behind the rugby field for 30 minutes at a time.
Hard, relentless hill repeats that would toughen her up for when the 800m got tough.
“Sponge told me that power was not enough to win,” said Semenya. “He told me that I had to be stronger at the end of the race. He trained me to do that. He trained me to win from the outside lanes. He taught me to run upright. We ran up and down that small hill.
“He taught me to run with no facial expression, which other people don’t understand. They see it as me having no pain and no effort. They misunderstand it. There is pain. I just don’t show it,” she said.
Semenya gave no outward sign of pain this week after she lost her appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on Wednesday.
But there was pain. There has been almost 10 years of pain and hiding it since the 2009 World Championships in Berlin.
Wednesday’s decision, that she and other athletes with Difference of Sex Development who have naturally high testosterone levels, will have to take medication if they wish to compete in distances between 400m and 1.6km, would have been another level of hurt for Semenya.
The past 10 years have been a confused, hurtful mess, beginning with the greedy clumsiness of Leonard Chuene, then Athletics SA president, who fooled Semenya into having a sex verification test while pretending it was a drug test. He lied to an 18-year-old girl and the world, creating a storm around Semenya.
When she gave a speech during the five-day hearing at the CAS, she said: “When I was
18 years old I won gold at the 2009 World Championship. It should have been a great achievement, but sadly it was tarnished.”
Those were ugly days in the aftermath of Semenya returning home from Germany in 2009.
There were crass, ugly, demeaning references to knowing when someone was a girl or not by pulling down her pants.
And through it all, Semenya endured, measuring her words, getting stronger, hiding the pain.
The ruling is not a complete victory for the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and you suspect they know this. The CAS decision has already been picked apart, the holes and caveats included in it exposed.
The study used by the IAAF to determine the rules has been derided as flawed.
One of the three arbitrators ruled against the IAAF and it is that dissent Semenya’s legal team will seek to amplify in an appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal.
The CAS said that while the IAAF’s ruling that athletes with high testosterone levels had to take hormones to lower them was “discriminatory”, the discrimination was justified as “a necessary, reasonable and proportionate means of achieving the IAAF’s aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics”.
The IAAF want to “level the playing field”. Four words that make little sense in elite sport. And four words that are nonsense when you consider that they only want to level that field in the 400m, 800m, 1,500m and 1.6km.
It is discrimination and more. It is a blatant targeting of Semenya. It is hard not to wonder whether the IAAF would have pushed for this as hard had Semenya been, say, a blonde Scottish woman.
It’s hard not to see the unspoken racism coursing through this. This is another hill for Semenya to run up. She learnt to endure on her hill in Pretoria. She learnt not to show pain on her hill.
She learnt the dignity and strength she has shown over these past 10 years on her hill. She will endure.