HRT therapy a health risk for Semenya, claim experts
CASTER SEMENYA will return to the track this evening no doubt aware that she will be subjected to scrutiny that goes way beyond her ability as an outstanding 800metres runner with two Olympic and two world titles. The debate as to whether the 26-year-old South African woman should be allowed to compete in a World Championship event will continue against the backdrop of Lord Coe and the IAAF — an organisation whose principal role should be to protect its athletes — trying to implement a rule forcing her to have Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) if she wants to keep running as someone with hyperandrogenism. But a Stanford University professor has not only exposed serious flaws in the scientific study being used by the governing body in the case they are submitting to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), she has raised concerns about potential health risks to athletes like Semenya should they force her take medication. Katrina Karkazis is a senior research scholar at Stanford University and testified in the Dutee Chand case that persuaded the CAS to suspend the IAAF’s testosterone rule for two years in 2015. ‘Lowering testosterone can have serious lifelong health effects,’ she explained. ‘If done via surgery, women are at high risk for osteoporosis.’ Karkazis is writing a book on testosterone and in an article she co-wrote with Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, a chronic disease epidemiologist in Australia, she challenged the validity of a study the IAAF commissioned to submit as evidence to CAS. ‘The IAAF is heralding this study as major and important evidence. It isn’t,’ write Karkazis and Meyerowitz-Katz. ‘CAS has been clear about what evidence it requires in order to uphold the regulation. The IAAF must show that female athletes with higher total T (testosterone) have a performance difference that approximates what male athletes typically have over female athletes; not that female athletes with higher T have a competitive advantage over their peers. In other words, it has to be a big performance difference, which CAS put in the 10-12-per-cent range. What the study found is nothing near this.’ The study, widely quoted in the media after Semenya denied Britain’s Laura Muir a medal in the 1,500m, claims higher testosterone levels can give an 800m runner a 1.8-per-cent advantage.