Word: semenya
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...meetings meant to hash out the science behind medical conditions that make it difficult to determine an athlete's sex. Long a topic of debate in Olympic circles (mandatory gender testing began in the 1960s), sex ambiguity hit the headlines again last year when South African runner Caster Semenya won the women's 800-m world championship in Berlin by an astonishing two-second margin. Fellow competitors raised concerns about Semenya's masculine appearance, prompting track and field's governing body to order sex testing. The results have yet to be released, but the case focused attention on the challenges...
Since discontinuing mandatory gender verification in 1999, the IOC has championed case-by-case evaluation of athletes with suspected gender disorders. The IOC, which will meet again after the Vancouver Games, is now wondering if that should change. Poorly handled cases like Semenya's suggest that the system is not working. Many athletes who agree to sex testing only learn of their medical condition from sports officials, which can be a shocking and painful way to face such an intimate revelation. María José Martínez-Patiño, who has AIS, was kicked off the Spanish...
Actually, Semenya doesn't run like a man. Her time wouldn't even have gotten her into the men's heats in Berlin. But in the flesh - at a homecoming in Polokwane, Limpopo's main city - Semenya's appearance was just as startling as it was on the track. At first, she rode high in an open-topped car, blushing and waving like a prom queen. A few minutes later, it was a burly-looking Semenya who rolled up to a microphone, baseball cap on backward, and thanked the crowd in a cracked baritone. Family and friends admit there...
...female's, and while the body produces testosterone, it is insensitive to its effect, prompting it to produce more. But though science acknowledges gender can be a continuum, sport - which requires like to compete against like - does not. A decision on where to draw the line, and whether Semenya is blessed by natural gifts or unfairly endowed with a freakish biological advantage, can only be subjective, says Malcolm Collins, chief scientist at the Research Unit for Exercise Science and Sports Medicine in Cape Town. From a scientific point of view, "it would be very difficult to draw a clear line...
Still, people tend to regard gender as a straightforward affair, and South Africa is a particularly hard place to be the "other." Apartheid's legacy has been an aggressive racial division that segregates ethnicities into plush suburbs and ghettos. The manner in which South Africa defended Semenya only underlines how obsessed with difference the country remains. When Semenya returned from Berlin, she was met by the leader of the ruling African National Congress Youth League, Julius Malema, who proclaimed the issue was not gender but race: Semenya was a victim of white officials, white media and unpatriotic white South Africans...