Rio de Janeiro >> It was a performance that was greeted with both wonder and frustration; three remarkable races on a single day last April that Caster Semenya’s supporters and detractors would claim validated their intense feelings on either side of a debate that has transfixed global track and field for the past seven years.
Semenya, the 2009 world 800-meter champion, began her day at the South Africa championships on April 16 by winning the 400 final in 50.78 seconds, then the world’s fastest mark by a woman that season. Less than an hour later, Semenya won the 800 title in 1:58.45, another world-leading clocking. She finished the day by also winning the 1,500.
In one mind-blowing day, Semenya, depending upon your point of view, either pronounced herself as a gold-medal threat in as many as three events at the Olympic Games or someone who would turn the Rio Games into a farce.
Or both.
Semenya, 25, is the biggest favorite of the Olympic track and field competition and, through no fault of her own, the most controversial figure in international women’s track. Critics charge that her success is the result of her hyperandrogenism, a medical condition in which a person displays excessive levels of androgenic hormones, in Semenya’s case testosterone. Her supporters in the medical, bioethics and gender study fields argue that claims that Semenya’s hyperandrogenism gives her a competitive advantage are not supported by research.
“Caster Semenya should be allowed to compete with other women and should not be penalized for what are, for her, natural advantages,” said Christopher O. Tollefsen, a philosophy professor at the Witherspoon Institute at the University of South Carolina who specializes in bioethics and has studied the Semenya case.
“Other athletes have their own natural advantages. She should not be penalized for hers.”
In the 800 it’s not so much a question of whether Semenya will win but whether she will do something that has been unfathomable for decades—break the world record of 1:53.28 set by Czechoslovakia’s Jarmila Kratochvilova in 1983 and an era where state-sponsored doping in Soviet Bloc nations was rampant. Semenya lowered her personal best to 1:55.33 at a Diamond League meet in Monaco on July 15. Should Semenya decide to compete in the 400 she would pose a major threat to Allyson Felix’s bid to follow up her 2012 Olympic 200 triumph with a 400 gold in Rio.
“I am dreamer,” Semenya recently told reporters. “What I dream of is to become Olympic champion, world champion, world-record holder.”
But many question whether a world-record victory or double gold-medal performance would provide a dream ending to seven emotionally draining, often degrading and controversial years for Semenya, whose most intimate information has been reported around the world, or an even greater nightmare?
“What if she smashes the world record by two or three seconds?” said Dr. Silvia Camporesi, director of London’s King’s College bioethics and society program. “They’re going to say OK a woman cannot run that fast.”
It is a charge that has hounded Semenya from the moment she emerged onto the international scene, winning the 800 at the 2009 African Junior Championships. In the weeks leading up the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, the IAAF, track’s global governing body began investigating Semenya, initially for doping. Eventually she was required to undergo a series of sex tests.
“The IAAF has not been sufficiently respectful of Caster Semenya’s privacy, and has acted in ways contrary to her dignity,” Tollefsen said.
Under IAAF procedures obtained by the Southern California News Group, women undergoing the sex tests must answer a series of questions including whether their parents are related as well as exams which are graded based on a “scoring sheet” provided doctors by the governing body. The women undergo “Detailed measurements” of their clitoris, labia, vagina and pubic hair. The size and shape of their breasts are also measured and diagrammed.
Doctors are provided hand-drawn diagrams with the “scoring sheet” that advice them how to give a “score value” from “1 to 4” for physical evidence in also detailing the upper lip, chin, chest, upper abdomen, lower abdomen, arms, thigh, upper back and lower back. At the end of the exam the women are given a “point total.”
Many of the teenager’s rivals based their own judgments on another number. In the wake of Semenya’s 1:55.45 2009 World’s victory, Russia’s Mariya Savinova suggested Semenya was a man.
“Just look at her,” Savinova said.
While the results of Semenya’s sex test were supposed to be confidential they were leaked to Australia’s Daily Telegraph. Semenya has internal testes but no ovaries or womb, the newspaper reported, quoting the test report.
“She is a woman, but maybe not 100 percent,” IAAF secretary general Pierre Weiss said at the time, doing nothing to discourage the headline writers at New York’s Daily News who blared that the World champion “is a woman … and a man.”
In 2011, the IAAF adopted a policy in which women with testosterone levels “within the male range” were barred from competition unless they agreed to take hormone-suppressing drugs or have their undescended testes surgically removed.
Semenya began taking a hormone suppressant drug. She finished second to Savinova at both the 2011 Worlds and 2012 Olympics. In a twist of fate, Semenya could end up the gold-medal winner in both races after the World Anti-Doping Agency recommended Savinova receive a lifetime ban for doping. U.S. middle distance runner Brenda Martinez echoed others in the sport when she said the IAAF would have been better served focusing on dopers than Semenya and other hyperandrogenism cases.
“She didn’t purposely set out to be this way,” Martinez said. “This is the way God made her. It’s not like she went out purposely doped.”
In fact in a October 2009 letter to a Russian official, the IAAF’s Weiss said that drug tests from that year’s Worlds “strongly suggest a systematic abuse of blood doping or EPO-related products” by Russian athletes.
“In general I think the IAAF should primarily be concerned with those who seek competitive advantage dishonestly, or by fraudulent means, and should investigate sex only when there is a reason to think that there exists an instance or accusation of dishonesty or fraud,” Tollefsen said. “No one has ever made such a suggestion about Caster Semenya to my knowledge, or about (India sprinter) Dutee Chand. So I think those are cases where the IAAF is best advised to leave those athletes be, and allow them to compete without hindrance.”
Camporesi and others in the medical and bioethics fields agree.
“In any sport there are all kinds of biological and genetic variations that constitute what an elite athlete is,” Camporesi said. “There are genetic and biological variations” in cells, beta markers and muscle fiber.
“These are not prosecuted as an unfair advantage,” she said.
“There is no level playing field in competition because of all the other genetic and biological variations. You cannot just look for the answer in science. You can’t just look at science or biology. It’s the continuum. You don’t have a binary division in terms of facts.”
Camporesi believe there are larger issues behind the push for gender testing.
“There is an increasing pressure on women athletes to perform femininely to avoid having their gender called into question,” she said.
Camporesi also questioned why the IAAF has focused on poor women from developing countries.
“To the best of my knowledge no white women have been tested yet,” she said. “It’s not just about fairness.”
The three-judge panel for the Court of Arbitration for Sport, an international body rules on sports disputes, agreed after hearing Chand’s case in March 2015. The CAS panel ruled the IAAF policy of requiring women to alter their bodies in order to compete was discriminatory and ordered it suspended until next July at which time the IAAF will have to provide evidence showing women with higher levels of natural testosterone have a competitive advantage. Otherwise, CAS said, the policy will be “declared void.” Semenya was no longer required to take hormones.
“It is abusive to require or encourage athletes or others to take medicine or hormones for non-medical reasons,” Tollefsen said. “ So I am happy that CAS has, at least for now, overturned the IAAF regulations about testosterone levels.”
The International Olympic Committee in February said will not take any steps to regulate the levels of women’s natural testosterone until a final ruling is made in the IAAF case.
During the CAS four-day hearing in the Chand case, IAAF officials acknowledged they had no research to back up the belief that excessively high levels of natural testosterone produced exceptional performances by women.
Not everyone, however, is convinced.
“I think it challenges and threatens the integrity of women’s sports to have intersex athletes competing against genetic women,” said Shannon Rowbury, a U.S. Olympian at 1,500 meters. “I think Caster is a wonderful person. I have nothing against her but I think we already have an established precedent of men’s sports and women’s sports and I think we have to honor that.
“Women have fought far too long to be able to even have the right to compete and now it’s being challenged by intersex and trans athletes and I don’t think that’s right.”
But others like Camporesi question whether the Semenya case is about protecting the integrity of women’s sports or dealing with long-held stereotypes about gender and sexuality in sports.
“I think definitely that plays an important role,” Camporesi said referring to Semenya’s background and appearance. “Everything started in 2009 at the Berlin World Championships. She was targeted because of how she looks. She didn’t make any effort to look feminine like other athletes do in track and field.”
Camporesi referred to the different way the bids of two South African heroes to compete at the Olympic Games were portrayed in the media. South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius was also the beneficiary of a CAS decision. Pistorius appealed an IAAF decision that banned his carbon-fiber prosthetic legs as an unfair advantage and said he would not be able race with them in the Olympics and other international competitions against non-handicapped athletes. CAS upheld his appeal. Pistorious failed to qualify for the 2008 Olympics but competed at the 2011 World Championships, winning a silver medal on the 4×400 relay.
“Two kinds of stories,” Camporesi said. “A white man, you could see how the media treated Oscar and all the positive stories. With Caster they portrayed her, dressed her up like a drag queen. Very different treatment for Caster.”
