Will IAAF cut other athletes down to size?
THE International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) is out to destroy 800m champion Caster Semenya. The IAAF has controversially proposed that female athletes like Semenya, who naturally produce high levels of testosterone, riddle their bodies with drugs to lower the production of the hormone.
This is a horrible treatment of an athlete who spends many hours in training, working hard to improve in her career. What’s next? Will the IAAF recommend that athletes like Usain Bolt, who naturally have long legs, must have them cut so that there is fairness on the athletics track?
Or will Kenyan long-distance runners be told to train at low altitude, outside their natural habitat, to compete fairly with other athletes?
The IAAF’s proposals are preposterous, and the more they push, the more they expose the fact that their action is intended to crush either women athletes, or black female athletes.
It is not as though Caster has ingested any performance-enhancing drugs. She runs naturally as a female athlete, and if she has natural advantages, like the long-legged Bolt or Kenyan athletes, she is not to blame.
Might we soon have Fifa propose that football will no longer be played under natural sunlight, because it gives an unfair advantage to players with “too much” melanin?
It is even worse that they refer to her as a “disorder of sexual differentiation” athlete, and she has to reduce her testosterone “down to female levels”. She is no “disorder” and she is female! Tembisa By Stephen Francis & Rico IT IS laughable to hear Patrice Motsepe discount the allegations that he will benefit from Eskom’s imminent demise.
Let’s put things into perspective: he is related to the president and to Energy Minister Jeff Radebe.
Motsepe’s company is already the biggest and leading private energy company - African Rainbow Energy and Power (Arep) - and its investment or business strategy is generation, transmission and distribution.
This is what the president announced during his Sona speech that he wants Eskom to be broken into three different new companies – generation, transmission and distribution.
If this coincidence, which is mind-blowing, does not raise eyebrows, especially the fact that all these decision-makers are related by marriage, then I don’t know what will.
Even more worrying to me, is Radebe has refused to release the names of the owners of 27 independent power producers (IPP’s) which have entered into multi billion rand agreements with the government, when the president authorised the deal. I wonder why such secrecy. After Radebe signed the deal without notice, in zero time Eskom goes into meltdown and Pravin Gordhan the Minister of Public Enterprises announces that the company is practically bankrupt, looks incapacitated and suddenly it has a lifespan up to April 1 this year.
I wonder who will be the beneficiaries if Eskom goes down the tubes. Bryanston