The last fortnight saw the IAAF World Championships being held in Berlin and plenty of outstanding performances, including Bolt’s 9.58 and 19.19, but the race that’s created the most controversy was undoubtedly the Women’s 800m, won comfortably by Caster Semenya. The problem seems to be that there are significant doubts about whether or not Caster is actually a woman. It’s clear from race photos that she’s lacking male genitalia, but otherwise her physique, facial bone structure and voice all suggest a maleness, as does the fact that she has shown testosterone levels three times higher than ‘normal’ women, and that she ran almost 2 seconds faster than the next woman, despite, in her own words, taking it easy for the last 200m!
Anyway, the IAAF have ordered comprehensive sex determination tests, which will take a couple of weeks to complete. For a more detailed analysis of what’s involved, this article at competitor.com, entitled What Is Caster Semenya? is worth a read.
Caster Semenya has become an overnight sensation. Regrettably it has been for her role in sport’s biggest current controversy – the question whether she might in fact be biologically part male. Some have simplified this question to a debate over whether Semenya is male or female, which is incorrect. Rather, the true question is whether Semenya may be intersex, which refers to a condition where ambiguous genitalia are present, and the genes don’t match up with the physiological development and appearance, making the classification of the person as either male or female is very difficult.
Intersex conditions result from what are called disorders of sexual development (DSDs). Authorities have suggested three broad categories of this condition. The first is that of a masculinized female; the second is an under-masculinized male; and the third is true hermaphroditism. In Semenya’s case, it would seem that one of the first two categories – the masculinzed female or under-masculinized male – may apply.
It has also been revealed that Dr. Ekkart Arbeit, the disgraced former East German coach, has been working with Semenya, so perhaps we’re seeing a return to the dark days of giving women such massive doses of steroids that they’ve developed male features. This article, on one of Arbeit’s previous subjects, Andreas (nee Heidi) Kreiger, is indicative of how things were in the GDR.
By the time Krieger arrived at the Dynamo Club [at 13yrs old], the doping officials - intoxicated by the success of their athletes - had taken steroid violations to scarcely believable levels. An average teenage girl produces about half a milligram of testosterone per day. Krieger, by the middle of her career, was being fed 30 milligrams of anabolic steroids each day, far in excess of Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter, at the height of his drugs programme.
State scientists also developed STS 646, an anabolic steroid that caused male characteristics in women at a rate 16 times that of Oral-Turinabol. It was distributed to coaches even though it had not been approved for human use, not even in stage one clinical trials. Even Höppner expressed his doubts, telling the Stasi that he was not willing to be held responsible. But Manfred Ewald, the president of the sports federation at the time, insisted that they were necessary and ordered an additional 63,000 tablets. Krieger was probably one of the recipients.