adminHAVING become the first Indian sprinter to reach a final at a global athletics event in 2013, the 18-year-old was already the national champion at 100m and 200m, and an Asian Games bronze medallist. Such was the excitement about her potential that the Sports Authority of India’s director general Jiji Thomson described her as a “sure shot Olympic medallist” of the future, and a place in a final on her Commonwealth Games debut looked within her reach.
But then, less than a fortnight before the opening ceremony in Glasgow, she “failed” a test that had nothing to do with fitness, form or even doping, and was dramatically withdrawn from the national team.
Like South African 800m sensation Caster Semenya before her, Chand discovered – in bold newsprint – that she had natural levels of the hormone testosterone normally only found in men. It did not take long before reporters were outside her parents’ humble home asking them and her six siblings if she was a boy or a girl.
Now, almost three months later, Chand is in limbo, unable to join the Indian team at the 2014 Asian Games, and unwilling to subject herself to the “corrective” treatment (hormone suppression therapy and sometimes even genital surgery) prescribed by the International Association of Athletics Federations, International Olympic Committee and other leading sports bodies.
“I am who I am,” says Chand with a mixture of defiance and dismay.
Instead of the sprinter she has spent years training to be, she has become the focus of a challenge to sport’s rules on gender, a cause celebre and evidence in a scientific debate about testosterone.
Concerns about men masquerading as women to win medals have been around for almost as long as women have been allowed to play sport, which is surprising given how rare it is. In fact, the last case most people can agree on is German high jumper Dora/Heinrich Ratjen. He nearly won a bronze medal at the 1936 Olympics.
Undeterred by the unlikelihood of a man successfully passing himself off as a woman, the IOC started comprehensive “gender verification” testing in 1968. Initially, this was done by asking female athletes to drop their underwear, but eventually a less humiliating method was found: checking swabs of cheek tissue for chromosomes, women being XX, men XY.
Unfortunately, Mother Nature is not as black-and-white as your typical blazer would like his competitions to be, and it turns out there are a dozen different conditions that would once have been lumped under “hermaphrodite”, but are now referred to by the less pejorative term of intersex, or disorders of sexual development.
Sport first cottoned on to this when Spanish hurdler Maria Jose Martinez-Patino was told in 1985 that she was an XY “man”, but refused to quit or feign injury (as it is widely believed many had before) and spent the next three years fighting ignorance and ridicule to line up alongside women again.
She got there in the end, proving her Y chromosomes were the product of a rare genetic syndrome. She was also able to show that her condition meant she was insensitive to testosterone: it was in her blood, but it was no good to her.
Sadly, Martinez-Patino’s most competitive years were behind her. It is not known what happened to the 13 women who “failed” gender tests at Olympics between 1972 and 1984. But sport seemed to have learned something, though, mainly that it did not know enough about these complicated issues, and by the end of the 1990s gender verification was shelved, apart from in cases of extreme suspicion. And then Semenya burst onto the scene.
A junior champion in 2008, the muscular teenager took seven seconds off her personal best for 800m over the next nine months, breaking the South African record and setting a world-leading time in the process. The IAAF felt “obliged to investigate”, if only to rule out doping.
Hours before the start of the 800m final at the 2009 World Athletics Championships, a race Semenya would win by a huge margin, it was leaked that the sport’s governing body had also asked for a gender test.
After Caster Semenya’s crushing win at the 2009 Worlds, a Russian rival sniped, “just look at her”. A young girl with a rare condition, and an even rarer talent, was subjected to a medical examination by media. – BBC Sport.
Online Reporter