Isegoria

Ross Tucker discusses hyperandrogenism and women vs women vs men in sport before going on to interview Joanna Harper:

Caster Semenya is about as sure a gold medal bet as there is at this year’s Olympic Games.  If I had one bet to make, and my life was at stake, I’d put in on her to win the 800m.  This past weekend she just missed out on the Diamond League record, running 1:56.46, at a jog.  A month ago, she won the 400m, 800m and 1500m at the SA champs, all on the same day.  The 400m and 800m, 50 minutes apart, were run in 50.7s and 1:58, with a second lap faster than 60 seconds, suggesting that she could go much, much faster.  I watched them in Stellenbosch and have never seen anything like it.  The 400m was jogged until the last 100m, and could have been under 49 seconds, and the 800m could have been run in 1:55 if it was needed.

Caster Semenya could, and should, break the 800m world record.  It’s the oldest record on the tracks, held by one Jarmila Kratochvilova, and if you know anything about the sport, you know that whoever it was who broke that record was going to be faced with a few probing questions.  Most of them would have been doping-related, but in the case of Semenya, thanks to the public drama that played out in 2009, they’re related to sex/gender.

Specifically, we know that Semenya was identified as having elevated testosterone levels after her gold medal in Berlin (1:55.45, as an 18-year old).  We know that some intervention was applied, and we can, through pretty basic deduction, figure out that it involved lowering her testosterone levels.  How?  Well, at the time Semenya emerged, from nowhere, the IAAF and IOC policies on gender verification (they should call it ‘sex verification’, by the way, because sex is biological, gender is social, but anyway) were vague and unrelated to testosterone.

It was as a result of Semenya, and the absolutely disastrous handling of that situation, that the policy changed, and until last year, the policy in place said that women could compete only if their testosterone levels were below an upper limit.  That upper limit, 10 nmol/L, was set up based on a study done on all the women competing in the World Championships in 2011 and 2013.  The researchers took the average testosterone levels of women with a condition called Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, which was already elevated at 4.5 nmol/L, and then added 5 SD to it.

The addition of 3 SD (which created a level of 7.5 nmol/L) would have meant that 16 in 1000 athletes would exceed the cutoff.  That’s why the extra 2 SD were added, to make sure that the upper limit would apply only to those with hyperandrogenism (or those who are doping).

99% of female athletes, by the way, had testosterone levels below 3.08 nmol/L. So the upper limit of 10 nmol/L was three fold higher than a level that applies to 99 in 100 women participants.

Semenya’s performances, under this policy of reducing testosterone, dropped off in a predictable manner.  Having run the 1:55.45 at 18, she never got close again, though did win Olympic silver in London (behind a doper), and a World silver in 2011.  Last year, she failed to advance beyond the semi-finals in Beijing, and hadn’t even made the qualification mark for the preceding year’s Commonwealth Games.  2:00 had become a significant barrier, when the world record had been plausible at 18.

Now, she is untouchable.  People will (and have said) that it’s down to her focused training, recovery from injury and so forth, but I’m not buying that.  The change has happened for an obvious reason – the restoration of testosterone levels, and that is thanks to the courts – CAS, the Court of Arbitration for sport, last year ruled that the IAAF could no longer enforce the upper limit of testosterone, and in so doing, cleared the way for Semenya, and at least a handful of others, to return to the advantages that this hormone clears provides an individual.  That CAS ruled this way because they felt that there was insufficient evidence for the performance benefits is one of the stupidest, most bemusing legal/scientific decisions ever made.

In any event, the situation now is this – Semenya, plus a few others, have no restriction.  It has utterly transformed Semenya from an athlete who was struggling to run 2:01 to someone who is tactically running 1:56.  My impression, having seen her live and now in the Diamond League, is that she could run 1:52, and if she wanted to, would run a low 48s 400m and win that gold in Rio too.

Semenya is of course not the only such athlete.  And in the absence of a policy, I fully expect more in future.  However, right now, Semenya is the unfortunate face of what is going to be a massive controversy in Rio.  That’s because she was so unfairly “outed” in Berlin in 2009, when what should have been handled discreetly became a public drama, thanks to inept/arrogant SA officials.  It won’t be any consolation to Semenya, and the media, frankly, have no idea how to deal with this – nobody wants it to be about the athlete, and it certainly is not her fault.  However, it is a debate we must have, and I want to try to have it from the biological, sporting perspective, and steer clear of the minority bullying that so often punctuates these matters.

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