The essential goal of sport, according to the bioethicist Thomas Murray, is the “virtuous perfection of our natural talents”. But what counts as “natural” – and who decides? These questions swirl beneath the surface of Caster Semenya’s unsuccessful challenge to track and field’s gender rules.
If the answers seem simple and obvious, you probably haven’t read science journalist David Epstein’s 2013 book The Sports Gene, an entertainingly nuanced take on the nature-nurture debate. He chronicles the “big bang of body types” – elite athlete physiques that are suited to specific sports. The best single candidate for a so-called sports gene, he concludes, tongue in the general vicinity of cheek, is the sex-determining gene on the Y chromosome.
If only it were that simple. For a while, sports authorities thought that it was, administering cheek swabs to check that female athletes had the expected XX chromosomes. But since the 1980s, awareness has grown about “differences of sex development” that make seemingly simple distinctions impossible.
All discussions of sex and gender are unavoidably political and sociological as well as biological. In Galileo’s Middle Finger, the American academic and intersex researcher Alice Dreger offers an insider’s view of just how fraught this terrain is, recounting her own battles with activists and scientists.
No one knows these turbulent waters better than Martina Navratilova, the former tennis star who has supported Semenya’s case but sparked outrage when she suggested that transgender women had “unfair” advantages competing against female opponents. Navratilova herself was a barrier-defying athlete. The best way to understand her athletic journey is through her longstanding rivalry and friendship with Chris Evert, as chronicled by sports journalist Johnette Howard in The Rivals. Over the course of 16 years, the two champions clashed 80 times, including 60 finals, sometimes sharing a bagel before the match then afterwards travelling together to the next tournament. As these two very different women come together through their pursuit of a common goal, we get a glimpse of why sport matters and why the right to compete needs to be carefully guarded.
Anna Kessel, recently appointed as women’s sports editor of the Telegraph, makes this point more explicitly in her 2016 book Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives. There’s a trunkful of cultural baggage and barely suppressed sexism pushing women away from participating, she argues, calling for a wholesale reimagining of sporting culture.
For all its flaws, though, sport is often in the vanguard of social struggle and change, from Jackie Robinson to Colin Kaepernick. In his award-winning novel The Illegal, Lawrence Hill follows the saga of Keita Ali, an elite marathon runner fleeing from impoverished Zantoroland to prosperous Freedom State. As so often in fiction and reality, sport becomes a metaphor for and a reflection of Ali’s struggles in life. And there’s a political subtext: how do you balance the rights of the few with the rights of the many? In the wake of all the Semenya coverage it’s a question that should sound hauntingly familiar.
• Alex Hutchinson’s Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Endurance is published by HarperCollins (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.