Caster Semenya ready to out-run her cynics
With the gender testing debate in sport threatening to be re-ignited, Trevor Cramer ponders whether controversy will still follow South African gold medal hopeful Caster Semenya around the two lap tartan athletics track in Rio.
The marquee Olympic events, track and field athletics, get underway in Rio de Janeiro on Friday.
South African track athlete Caster Semenya is one of Team South Africa's big gold medal hopefuls and lines up as the overwhelming favourite in the women's 800 metres.
She has obliterated all before her over the two-lap race and continues to astound friend and foe alike with her immense muscular power, agility and strength. In fact, she has been in cruise mode in the build-up to Rio and appears more than capable of going even faster.
However, she remains under close scrutiny from her fellow athletes and a more often-than-not insensitive foreign media over her gender status.
It came to my attention on Thursday that International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) president Sebastian Coe had confirmed his organisation’s intention to challenge the ruling which suspended the monitoring of female athletes with higher than usual levels of testosterone.
The mere suggestion that the IAAF could pursue this avenue suggests that the whole Caster Semenya debacle may be about to rear its ugly head again. Unlike in 2009, Caster appears to be taking the looming controversy in her stride. Back then, the whole debacle almost ended her career at the tender age of 18.
Clearly she was was mentally scarred in 2009 when she was subjected to gender testing and had to withdraw from all international competition for more than a year.
South Africa being in a unique country, one can't help recalling that in the midst of the storm, politics trumped science in that instance. But she appears to have swiftly moved on and seems mentally geared to take gold in Rio.
Semenya has what is commonly known as an intersex condition (hyperandrogenism). This allows her body to produce higher testosterone levels than most females.
Rules were subsequently introduced which required female athletes to obtain special medical clearance before competing in their chosen sport. That has now been shelved by the International Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and no athlete is allowed to be subjected to any form of sex testing at the Rio Games.
But Coe appears to be making a bit of an about-turn and seems to feel the issue needs to be put to the test again.
Semenya didn't conceal her humiliation back in 2009: “I have been subjected to unwarranted and invasive scrutiny of the most intimate and private details of my being," she said at the time.
It wasn't so much about the merits or de-merits of the testing process, but more about the poor way in which the tests were carried out. So much so that the results were leaked to the media at the time. Semenya was forced to watch as her whole career imploded.
In June, she ran a personal best in the 800 metres. At the South African championships in April, she won races at three different distances on the same day.
But like it or not, controversy will keep following her around the athletics track.
South Africans are not too concerned with medical opinions or the IOC or IAAF's stance on the matter, and are ready to cheer Caster on at the Games in Rio.
All we want is Semenya's quest for Olympic gold to be successful.