Semenya and Chand will race at the Commonwealth Games in April but their fight for the right of hyperandrogenic athletes to compete is far from over
South Africa’s Caster Semenya celebrates after winning the 800m final at the world championships in London last summer.
Photograph: Tom Jenkins/the Guardian
It’s been just under six months since Caster Semenya ran at the world championships, which makes it just over five since the last time everyone was talking about intersex athletes in sport. The media cycle moves along but the debate goes on. Last Friday the court of arbitration for sport released details of the latest developments in the crucial case of Dutee Chand v the IAAF. Semenya became the public face of the fight for the rights of hyperandrogenic athletes because she is so successful. But it’s Chand, a 21-year-old Indian sprinter, whose lawyers have been prosecuting the argument against the IAAF’s policies.
Chand was born in Gopalpur in Jaipur in 1996, one of seven children in a family that lived below the poverty line. She always loved to sprint. They say when she was a kid she spent so much time running that the neighbours thought she was crazy. When she was 10 she won a spot at a government-run sports hostel and in her teens she broke local, state, and national records in the 100m and 200m. In 2014, aged 18, she was picked in the India relay squad for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. And then she was dropped from it when tests showed her natural testosterone levels were higher than the International Association of Athletics Federations allowed.
This was under the regulations introduced in 2011 in reaction to the controversy over Semenya’s performances in 2009. At this point Chand had four options. She could start a course of hormone suppressing drugs, as Semenya did. She could have unnecessary and invasive surgery, which is what the IAAF encouraged several other young intersex athletes to do. She could quit or she could fight for her right to race. As Chand said: “I want to remain who I am and compete again.” She took the case to Cas. In 2015 the court gave an interim ruling suspending the IAAF’s testosterone limit.
Dutee Chand had two choices. She could quit or she could take on the IAAF. ‘I want to remain who I am and compete,’ she said. Photograph: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images
There are so many sides to this argument. It is being fought on ethical grounds because it pitches the rights of a marginalised minority against the need to ensure fair competition for the majority. And it is being fought on logical grounds because while high testosterone is a natural advantage, athletics is a sport that already seeks to “protect” female competitors from those who possess that advantage by splitting men and women into separate categories. But Cas decided that it all came down to scientific proof.
The court found the IAAF had failed to prove natural testosterone provides a significant athletic advantage. You might intuitively assume it does since artificial testosterone is a banned performance enhancer. Natural testosterone is another matter and besides it is hard to quantify the size of any advantage when there are so many variables involved in performance. There was dissent about the decision even among the group of consultants who reached the consensus that allowed the IAAF to bring in a testosterone limit in the first place.
So for two years Semenya and Chand were able to compete unhindered while the IAAF tried to find proof. Last July it showed its hand. A key piece of new research was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The headline finding was that in Semenya’s favourite event, the 800m, women with high testosterone levels had a 1.8% performance advantage. Here, it seemed, was the IAAF’s proof. The 1.8% figure was widely repeated in TV and newspaper commentaries. It drew a lot of attention because the IAAF pushed it so hard in the media.
Last Friday Cas released some brief notes on the state of the IAAF’s case. The upshot is the final decision has been suspended for another six months, which means Chand and Semenya will be able to compete at the Commonwealth Games in Australia in April. There is nothing much left for Semenya to prove at those Games but for Chand, who was so traumatised by her public humiliation in 2014, they will be a precious opportunity to make a major final. The reason for the delay is that instead of defending the existing, suspended, testosterone limit, the IAAF appears to have submitted an entirely new set of regulations to Cas.
In the words of Cas, the IAAF submission “includes draft revised regulations that would only apply to female track events over distances of between 400 metres and one mile”. This is strange, because that same key study the IAAF was so keen to publicise last summer also found the testosterone advantage was even greater in the pole vault (2.9%) and the hammer throw (4.5%). Yet the IAAF has provided Cas with a set of draft regulations that do not make any provision for those events. So the IAAF’s proposals do not seem to be in line with its proof.
Which may be because in the six months since that key study was published and publicised, the methods behind it have been called into question. The same day Cas put out its press release, the BJSM published another paper that systematically dismantled the techniques that produced the 1.8% finding. In the meantime the IAAF has changed its case. It proposes new regulations that cover only women’s middle distances, events Chand does not run in.
As ever, it feels like it all comes back to Semenya, who could be forgiven for thinking the IAAF’s motives are all about her.