Intersex Runner Caster Semenya Of South Africa To Take Center Stage At Rio Olympics

Caster Semenya, a South African runner, is set to become one of the most prominent athletes of the upcoming Rio Olympics. She is the favorite to win gold at 800 meters while possibly breaking track’s longest-standing world record.

Nevertheless, there remains one characteristic about Semenya, aside from her astounding speed, that distinguishes her from dozens of other Olympic competitors and that will undoubtedly generate severe controversy: she is intersex.

Semenya, 25, has never overtly said she is intersex — a term preferred to the stigmatizing ‘hermaphrodite’ — but she is being held under intense scrutiny, after it was revealed following her gold medal victory at the Berlin 2009 World Championships that she had been subjected to gender testing, one of the few Olympic athletes in history to be subjected to this. (Intersex is an umbrella term for people who are born with sex characteristics “that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies,” according to a definition by the human rights arm of the United Nations.)

Track observers believe Semenya to be hyperandrogenous, meaning her body naturally produces high levels of testosterone, the hormone that helps build muscle, endurance and speed. The International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF), track and field’s governing body, has rules limiting the amount of naturally occurring functional testosterone allowed for female athletes. But today those limits are in an undefined middle-ground.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) suspended these rules last summer, citing insufficient evidence that high levels give female athletes an advantage in performance. The IAAF has until next summer to make a case for its regulations or the court will abolish them.

“This is a huge human rights victory,” intersex studies expert Joanna Harper tells USA TODAY Sports, “but sports, not so much.”

Harper, chief medical physicist of radiation oncology at Providence Portland (Ore.) Medical Center, is trying to say that some intersex athletes may have hormone-fueled advantages over other female competitors in Rio.

Maria José Martínez-Patiño, a world-famous intersex athlete who competed as an elite hurdler for Spain in the mid-1980s, has called this issue a “free-for-all.” Gender testing on her found that she had XY chromosomes. She soon learned that her outwardly female figure hid internal testes. She ended up losing her place on the national team, her scholarship, her fiance, and her privacy and sense of identity.

“Everything taken away,” Martínez-Patiño says in Spanish, “as if I never existed.”

Today, she is a professor of science education and sport at Spain’s University of Vigo and an advisor to the International Olympic Committee’s medical commission. Martinez-Patiño is also strongly in favor of the since-suspended limits on testosterone.

“The reality of sports is someone will always have an advantage,” she says. “It’s very difficult to establish who has it and who does not. We need to have a rule that applies to everybody.”

Martínez-Patiño was dismissed from the Spanish team ahead of the 1988 Seoul Games because of her sex chromatin test. She appealed based on a condition called complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, which prevents her body from responding to testosterone, negating any advantage. She won her appeal and regained her status. But she failed to make the 1992 Spanish Olympic team; her moment had passed.

“It’d be easy to believe because of the difficulties of that past that I would be opposed to any rules,” Martínez-Patiño says. “That’s not the case. That would not be fair, not be ethical. I understand the positions of other people. I am in favor of rules.”

She added, however, that the true difficulty is balancing the human rights of intersex athletes with the competitive rights of other athletes.

British marathoner Paula Radcliffe caused a great stir this month when she said on the BBC that if Semenya is sure to win the 800 “then it’s no longer sport.” She later added in a statement that portions of what she said did not capture the complexity of her overall point. “I tried to get across how difficult and complicated the situation is and how finding a solution where nobody gets hurt is pretty much impossible.”

The IAAF said in a statement to USA TODAY Sports that it does not comment on individual athletes: “On Hyperandrogenism Regulations the IAAF has publically confirmed that its regulations were suspended for two years by CAS in 2015 until more evidence is provided as to the precise degree of performance advantage that hyperandrogenic female athletes enjoy over athletes with normal testosterone levels.”

South African track officials did not provide any further comments.

Semenya’s time of 1:55.45 at the 2009 World Championships, which she won when she was 18, was among the fastest in history. Competitors began asking several questions, and people began calling her a man with high levels of testosterone and other disparaging comments.

The IAAF’s and IOC’s vague policies on gender verification at the time considered testosterone levels, though that was only part of it. After Semenya’s case, the IAAF developed a rule that specified female athletes could not compete with functional testosterone levels above 10 nanomoles per liter, an upper limit determined to be three times higher than 99% of the women who had competed at recent world championships.

The IOC adopted the IAAF rule in time for the London Games, where Semenya won silver at 800 meters, behind Russia’s Mariya Savinova, since caught in her nation’s state-sponsored doping scandal. Semenya was performing at an elite level, but well shy of the promise of her astonishing performances in 2009. Harper says short of surgery that medication — typically Spironolactone and external estrogen — is the most likely way to reduce naturally high testosterone levels.

Last year, Semenya failed to advance past the semifinals in the 800 at the world championships. This year Semenya is improving markedly. She won the 400-, 800- and 1500-meter runs — all on the same day — at the South African championships. Her time of 1:55.33 in the 800 this month is the world’s best since 2008.

LONDON, ENGLAND – AUGUST 09: Caster Semenya of South Africa competes in the Women’s 800m Semifinals on Day 13 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at Olympic Stadium on August 9, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)