10) Caster Semenya under the scanner again after Olympic gold medal win in 800m
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South Africa’s Caster Semenya had won the women’s 800m with a time of 1:55.28 and clinched the gold medal in Rio while the likes of Canada’s Melissa Bishop and Great Britain’s Lynsey Sharp had missed out on medals after losing out on the final straight. Sharp was seen consoling a weeping Bishop (who came fourth) while Semenya also lent her support.
But it was the comments made after the race by Sharp that pushed a long-standing issue back into the spotlight – Semenya’s unnaturally high testosterone levels. The South African is a hyperandrogenic athlete – one who has excessive levels of androgens in the body.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport had overturned the IAAF’s rule to ensure that athletes with high levels of testosterone take hormone-suppressing drugs, claiming there was no evidence to suggest that such athletes had an advantage.
“I have tried to avoid the issue all year,” Sharp said when asked about the rule change “You can see how emotional it all was. We know how each other feels [about the rule change]. It is out of our control and how much we rely on people at the top sorting it out,” she said in tears.
Sharp had even written a paper on Semenya when she was in law school and English long distance runner Paula Radcliffe said she understood where Sharp was coming from with those comments.
“However hard she goes away and trains, however hard Jenny Meadows goes and trains, they are never going to be able to compete with that level of strength and recovery that those levels of elevated testosterone brings.”
Many want action taken against hyperandrogenic athletes who compete with an unfair advantage. Semenya, who is used to the constant scrutiny, only celebrated her win after crossing the finish line and declined to discuss the CAS ruling at the press conference, opting to focus on questions about the race alone.
