The Caster Semenya Debate

Top performances, based on focused training and recovery from injury? I’m not buying that.

- Dr Ross Tucker

The intersex-athlete issue is one of the most controversial in sport, and South African Caster Semenya has been at the forefront of it since she won the women’s 800 metres at the 2009 World Championships.

The bungling of her case – first by Athletics South Africa, and then the IAAF – exposed us to the idea that a person can be genetically male or female, but for reasons that usually relate to how the body produces and uses hormones, they develop as the opposite sex.

Made Male 

The problem for sport is that this person may be ‘partly androgenised’ – androgenisation being the biological term for ‘made male’. That’s what testosterone gives to boys at puberty: deepening of the voice, hair growth, a different shape of the skeleton, increased muscle mass and reduced body-fat percentage.

Some of those are irrelevant, for sport; but low body-fat percentage and increased muscle mass and strength are a big deal for an athlete, and that’s why the issue is controversial.