Let’s all watch the attacks and stereotypes here please.
The question here- and the only question is: Should she be, or have been allowed to compete?
I don’t understand why the old chromosome test was removed. What was intended to replace it? Is this nightmare not the natural outcome of political correctness gone amok leaving only public warfare?
There was considerable discussion over last year’s winner that was never addressed. Did that have any bearing on this year’s case?What will be the trend going forward? Will federations go out on scavenger hunts looking for physical types that can win in a few months of training over girls who’ve trained a lifetime? What happens when this extends beyond the 800m alone?
Damn so she cant run because of something she was born with. Its not her fault. She cant run with the men so I guess her career is over.
I can see the legal argument stating that she isn’t male, so therefore she can only be the other, a woman.
Vibes I got from the news tonight was why pick on this kid other sports don’t pick on theirs.
There are two issues here why…
- Domination
- Future results/records
If she is allowed to continue competing, (after having improved her PB by 16 sec. in a year and winning the title convincingly), will her “condition” allow her to continue improving at much greater rate than other woman, and how IAAF will handle/cop with/justify/act/explain to public (after having learned all about this case) that they are behind someone who may be breaking WRs easier than Bolt but with an advantage while at the same time vigorously defending their standpoint on performance enhancing accessories!
What if all other competitors say: we all will run once we have balls too! And refuse to compete if CS is in the race with them?
Remove them, undergo HR therapy and continue running, I say.
For the record, kk1, and CF, my previous remark was not targeting any particular ethnic group, rather I used it to point out that it is easier to scream - it is because you are antisemitic, racist, sexist, alcoholic, homophobic or a sprinter - (as the Sport Minister did when blamed IAAF for racism and sexism) than rationally discuss the matter, find a solution, and in an orderly and civilised fashion deal with the matter.
The Minister threatened with a war! I know he was no different to Damir Dokic who made stupid threats towards an Aussie diplomat and that his “war” was rhetorical stunt but being a minister you should act like one, especially when dealing with sensitive issues. Humans need to evolve further, or better, we need to grow up.
This story depends on whose ox gets gored. What if this scenario affected the 400m rather than the 800m, where primarily other Africans were were disadvantaged? Would we hear a different level of outcry?
No no. There are certainly not only two genders. Many people, particularly from Southern Africa are born intergender.
Because of my involvement with Athletics South Africa and the sensitivity of the situation and the farce in RSA about this I will not say much except that we warned the federation 3 years ago about Semenya’s gender. They chose to ignore.
And I would say that’s where the majority culpability rests - with Athletics SA. They tried to con the world and they have been exposed, but to date the victim is Semenya.
Do you think Caster knew she was “more than a woman”? Surely she must always have known she had superior strength, speed and endurance just from her experiences in the school playground.
Not necessarily, here she is a year ago when her PB was 2.08
I have to say that her training would have changed dramatically from the WJC to now as she was taken into the national high performance centre shortly after the WJC. Her training would have become much more professional in terms of S&C, nutrition etc. The support she gets there is excellent and the S&C is with RSA’s best strenth coach. What the training for the 800m is concerned I can’t think that that changed much as she has had the same coach for a while.
In the video there is a clear difference in her physical attributes to what she looks like today. She looked like she did in the video since the first time I saw her at the age of 15.
I really feel for her as she is a nice girl. Yet, if most of us had a girl that could produce so much testosterone and no estrogen we’d also be able to develope such strength and speed.
Hello,
First time poster. I have enjoyed reading these threads for awhile now!
Regarding the Caster Semanya situation then it is a very delicate matter. On the one hand we have a person who identifies with their female side and who was raised as a girl. Conversely, we have a sport whereby the rules dictate the parameters of what is female and what is not.
I think it is unfortunate that Caster Semanya will get ‘hurt’ by all of this. I feel she has been somewhat let down by her own South African authorities and to an extent the IAAF who aired her dirty laundry in public before they should have.
However, Caster Semanya has an innate, genetic advantage over her fellow athletes in as much as she has 3 times the testosterone levels in her body. Further, she was born a haemaphrodite which further consolidates the idea that her gender has the advantages that a masculine disposition brings.
I do feel it is unfair for her to compete and I felt sorry for the other women in the 800m race. I also think it is unfair to say anyone questioning it is racist - that is an appalling way to try and suffocate people with ‘truths’ to tell. We have seen similar cases throughout history where white and Asian athletes have been banned for their questionable gender status.
Anyway, just some thoughts!
She may be a hermaphrodite but that’s still one rung below Kratochvilova on the man-ladder…
I don’t agree. Kratochvilova was a sprinter who ran 800m (twice) once as a training run breaking the world record and a second time to win the World Champs. Her times for 100m and 200m were world class, very low 11 and 22’s. Obviously her 400m pedigree speaks for itself. She trainied as a sprinter and hence the physical attributes. If compared to the other female sprinters of the time she does not look out of place. Even by todays standards if you compare her to some of the Jamaican sprinters.
If you train for the 800m and 1500m on the other hand, you will be hard pressed to be able to have so much muscle. If Semenya trainied for the 400m and 800m, then maybe.
Actually, Jarmila Kratochvilova’s personal best over 200m was 21.9!
It’s bloody Allan Wells with a perm 
Lol.
I personally think she looks more like Roger Daltrey!
Maybe, but her voice was much deeper.
Actually, I bumped into Jarmila at Gothenburg 1995 and you wouldn’t have know she was ever an athlete. She lost all that definition and muscle mass and so had softened completely. Amazing reversal abck to what we think of as femininity… she was doing a radio coverage of the worlds at that time.
South Africa turn on own over Caster Semenya
By Mike Hurst
From: The Daily Telegraph
September 15, 2009 12:00AM
Gender misfit … Caster Semenya. Source: AP
ATHLETICS South Africa bosses are now squirming under the same international spotlight to which they cruelly exposed their gender misfit Caster Semenya.
National head coach Wilfred Daniels, who recently resigned from ASA over his role in duping Semenya into submitting to sex tests in early August, yesterday blasted officials for casting Caster to the wolves.
"All Athletics South Africa cared about was getting medals … they never thought about what they were doing to Caster,’’ Daniels said.
In a world exclusive, The Daily Telegraph revealed last Friday that 800m world champion Semenya was a hermaphrodite, or intersex person, who has internal testes but no womb or ovaries.
Daniels was speaking in response to comments from Phiwe Tsholetsane, ASA’s manager of events, marketing and communications who is also Semenya’s self-appointed manager.
Tsholetsane told South Africa’s The Star newspaper: "Our constitution does not recognise gender verification … how could we have stopped her from competing? Our mandate was to come back with medals … how would we have explained not allowing Caster to run to the minister [of sport]?
"If there are other Casters out there, we will also let them run.’’
Daniels said Tsholetsane’s comments were symptomatic of "a win-at-all-costs mentality that has destroyed a young woman’s life’’.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READ FOR BEING BOTH AMUSING AND WISE
Monday, September 14, 2009
Semenya case poses a real dilemma for IAAF
LOCKER ROOM: The world athletics body must balance the needs of a young national hero with the obligation to be fair to her fellow-competitors, writes TOM HUMPHRIES
AS A columnist – even a slumdog columnist living here in the intellectual shantytown that is the back page – there is a duty to have a position on absolutely everything. The union insists on it. In the great universe of sport a sparrow shall not fall without us columnists taking positions on the dubious trajectory which preceded its terminal splat.
(Fall? Was it a dive? Is this what Eduardo has taught the little sparrows? Was the sparrow pushed? Was there drink involved? Kinky sex games gone wrong? Ron Atkinson? What about the ‘on the decline of sparrows as a force’ etc etc). It helps too if you can have not just a position but an accompanying rise in your blood pressure which you can express through the medium of bad prose. This gift of being angry 52 times a year at least is what separates the truly gifted columnist from the journeyman hum and haw merchant or the lame humorist. Even those of us ambidextrous types who do our humming and hawing through the medium of lame humour yearn for some surge of strident anger with which to add a little bile to the back page.
Every so often, though, a subject comes along which lends itself only to humming and hawing. Leaving aside the unfortunate leaks and the exquisite sensitivities, what would you do with a girl like Caster Semenya? It is impossible to have any (oh, God) hard and fast opinions on a situation which shifts its moral fulcrum every time you look at it from a different angle.
Perhaps the only thing we can be sure of is the IAAF are as supremely ill-equipped as the rest of us for dealing with a situation which requires them to balance the needs of an 18- year-old national hero against the obligations of fairness to all the other national heroes who compete in the 800 metres.
The rules on testosterone ratios which were imposed to police sport against drug cheats have always been a little blurry at the border and have necessarily erred on the side of generosity. The natural ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone in the body should be 1:1. The current world permissible ratio as laid down by WADA is 4:1 and, in cases where this ratio is exceeded, carbon isotope ratio tests are capable of detecting the fingerprints of synthetic testosterone as opposed to the testosterone we generate naturally through what we eat.
And the rules are there for a reason. To protect other competitors and to protect the integrity and dignity of sport because without those things sport is meaningless.
What’s to be done, though, if through some genetic quirk a female competitor is born with the internal equipment to produce abnormal amounts of testosterone within her body? The Sydney Daily Telegraph, which carried the purported leak from the tests performed on Caster Semenya, claims the tests prove she has no womb or ovaries, but internal male testes which are producing extraordinary amounts of testosterone.
There is a duty, first of all, to the tender sensibilities of the 18-year-old girl involved in the current case. The manner and volume of the current inquiries and leaks concerning her physiological make-up have been unacceptable in a situation where there is no suggestion of doping or cheating.
An otherwise normal life, crowned by the fulfilment of a World Championship win, has turned into a nightmare from which it is difficult to see any escape. The word which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald will always hang like a captioned verdict over Caster Semenya if and when people see her compete again.
Caster Semenya has acted with dignity throughout and the spikily protective manner in which the people of South Africa have reacted to the controversy is understandable. Over the weekend the sports minister, Makhenkesi Stofile, waded in saying it would be unjust if Semenya was precluded from competing as a woman and that any attempt to remove her world title from her would mean “a third world war.” What, though, to do in the long term? If Caster Semenya were a doping cheat whose ratio turned up a figure as off the scale of 18:1 the clean competitors in her event would have the right to expect to be protected. Gender tests are nothing new in athletics and the old East German sports machine specialised in chemically turning young women into men.
One German sports physician described Olympic sport as “a gigantic biological experiment carried out on the human organism” over the past 100 years.
It was only right and proper that stringent doping laws should attempt at least to protect clean athletes from dirty rivals and to protect dirty athletes from themselves. How many doping cheats have we heard from down through the years who have claimed that the freakish toxicity found within their body was just a natural thing caused by their toothpaste or too much sex or watching television etc, etc? We protect the sport and other competitors from those we find guilty.
What to do, though, when nature just hop- skips an innocent competitor to the place where every cheat wants to get to? What to do when, through no fault of her own, a young woman winds up with genetic advantages which are off the scale?
Most great athletes come to this earth with some sort of genetic advantage. Sportspeople and scientists will debate long and hard the reasons for the dominance of Kenyans and Ethiopians in middle distance running. Are there genetic or environmental reasons for their extraordinary dominance? There is a sensitivity about the subject of racial biology which has been notably absent from the current debate about gender biology but the same assumptions underline a lot of the debate from the forlorn old notion that black fast bowlers were, for genetic reasons, impossible for the solid white cricketer to deal with, to the notion that white men can’t jump.
There is no doubt black dominance of athletics in particular and sport in general has prompted many quiet and often ill-informed discussions and arguments as to whether there is a biological superiority at play. Nobody on either side of the debate suggests a return to mono racial sport, however.
What to do with Semenya, though? Are her genetic advantages any more unfair than those accruing to a seven-foot ten-inch basketball player or an extraordinarily supple gymnast? Does her innocent arrival at a place where cheaters aspire to go automatically make her presence in a race unfair?
Sympathy for her is easy right now. How would we feel though if we added some partisanship to the mix? If Sonia O’Sullivan back in the day was among the also-rans behind a Caster Semenya, not once but again and again. Would we be threatening world war three? When Sonia was running we had hard and fast opinions about many of her rivals, including one hirsute character who had such a crop of facial stubble that her nickname among the other athletes was a play on her surname and on the word beard.
Caster Semenya’s case raises more questions than there are answers. The IAAF, used to being cast in the role of flat-footed policemen, find themselves in an odd cleft where they have to achieve a balance between humanity towards an innocent young athlete and fairness to her rivals.
We columnists who are supposed to have a position on everything can only hum and haw till we see what position the IAAF takes. Then, whatever it is, we’ll confidently denounce it.
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times