The Best American Sports Writing 2017

by Glenn Stout

  Filmon Berhe, another midfielder, had been quiet, listening as his teammates did the explaining. Bearded, with wary eyes, he was usually not much of a talker. But he was getting frustrated. The ambassador didn’t understand what they were telling him. “Where are your children?” Berhe asked.

  Omar paused. “They are living with me at the moment,” he said.

  “That is why you don’t feel for us,” Berhe said. “You don’t understand what we are going through.”

  Omar angrily left the room and destroyed their passports. When he returned, he said, “I’m not responsible for you. You’re on your own.”

  The mass defection was a humiliation for the government, and if the players were deported back to Asmara they could face severe punishment. (Refugees who have been forced to return speak of being tortured, and of being held for years in windowless shipping containers with little food and water.) Gebreab, the PFDJ official, suggested that the soccer team had been deliberately lured away. “How about our runners and our cyclists who compete and come back?” he said. “For me, this is cherry-picking. In Botswana, they were given cause—they said if they stay there they will be given green cards and they will be going to the United States, so most of them decided to stay. It shows that there are certain people in this country who will take any opportunity to leave.”

  At the police station, though, Arefaine became convinced that they had made the right decision. “It was like I was born again—I had been given a second chance,” he recalled. As the teammates pleaded with the police chief, he softened, and admitted that they had the right to apply for asylum. After waiting a week in jail, they saw a Botswana lawyer, and were allowed to call their families. Arefaine told his that he was safe.

  One Sunday afternoon in Asmara, I went to see Adulis, the Asmara municipal team, play Red Sea, owned by the Red Sea Trading Corporation. The players, wearing crisp uniforms in yellows and reds, warmed up on a wide green field, surrounded by a red-brown track. Old men in corduroy blazers sat on concrete bleachers, alongside boys in sweatshirts with headphones plugged into their ears. Everyone was talking and laughing with excitement.

  The defection of so many good players in the past decade had left a dearth of talent. These were two of the best teams in the country, but the players’ footwork was sloppy, and passes kept going out of bounds. “It’s like the ball is moving on its own,” one spectator said. Another, a bald man in a camel-colored blazer, looked on in disgust. “I’m not happy with this team,” he said.

  After halftime, Adulis scored a goal—but the ball trickled out through a hole in the side of the net. The stadium erupted. “How can that be a goal?” a bearded young man in a blue button-down shirt yelled in front of me. (The man asked not to be named, fearing retaliation from the government, so I refer to him as Freselam.) Freselam told me he had been a finalist for the national soccer team that had competed in Botswana but had narrowly missed the cut. Now he was playing for another club team. It was a decent life, he said: he practiced twice a week and got paid 1,600 nafka a month, along with room and board at the clubhouse.

  As the game went on, the fans’ frustration gave way to scuffles in the stands, and then to an all-out fracas. In the last minutes, a referee called a foul on Adulis, and Red Sea scored on a penalty kick, winning the match. Policemen wielding batons had to escort the referee out of the stadium amid fans shouting threats. “I’m going to kill you,” Freselam shouted at a man who was hassling the referee. “People like you shouldn’t even be here!”

  After the match, Freselam headed to a pizzeria to celebrate with some of the winning athletes and fans. He had become friends with several national-team players who are now in Botswana, and had been saddened when he learned that they weren’t coming back. “I was disappointed that I wouldn’t see them again,” he said. “But it was their choice.”

  When I asked about Arefaine, Freselam smiled broadly. “He was one of the strongest players, especially with his speed,” he said. “He scored a lot of points.”

  “He’s a nice guy,” another player said. “We miss him a lot.”

  The two players said that they hadn’t been surprised when Arefaine defected. It was just something that happened in Eritrea. But they were surprised to hear that he had been dissatisfied with his life there: he always seemed happy, they said. Later, Arefaine told me, “You don’t want to seem to anyone that you are not happy in Asmara. Because if you do, they may arrest you.”

  A few months ago, Arefaine and Russom, the left back, took a minibus from the refugee camp where they have been staying to Galo Shopping Center, a fashionable mall in Francistown. An airy, light-flooded complex with an attached supermarket, it was filled with late-afternoon shoppers. The men were relieved to be away from the camp, an uncomfortable place with limited electricity and running water. “It’s not what we expected,” Russom said. Unaccustomed to the local food, the players had grown skinny. They had little money, scrounging what they could from sympathizers in the Eritrean diaspora and trading their food rations with local shops to buy pasta, as well as minutes for the phones they shared. They had nothing to do and nowhere to be.

  “Most Eritreans—refugees and those inside the country alike—are living in extended limbo,” Zere, the exiled journalist, said. “Home has turned into a source of deferred dreams and destitution, characterized by brutal dictatorship, while fleeing is becoming equally challenging.” Refugees who flee the Horn of Africa face the risk of torture, rape, and murder by smugglers in the Sahara, and then a treacherous journey by sea. Yet those who make it fare much better than those who stay in Ethiopia and Sudan, who can get stuck in desolate camps. Some of the players who defected in 2008 have reconstituted their team in the Netherlands, and Arefaine and his teammates talked dreamily of their compatriots’ new lives. At the camp, they ran and kicked around a ball when they could, but they were worried that they wouldn’t get a chance to play professional soccer again. An official at the U.S. embassy in Gaborone, Botswana’s capital, told me that the worldwide exodus of refugees, from Syria and elsewhere, had made the team a low priority for resettlement. The UN, which administers the camp, is turning it over to Botswana in a few weeks, and the government has expressed a desire to send refugees home.

  A sister of one of the soccer players lives in the U.S., and she contacted John Stauffer, the president of an advocacy group called the America Team for Displaced Eritreans. Stauffer had been worried that the “astonishing” reach of the Eritrean government would thwart the team’s asylum application. “The Eritrean regime strives to control the diaspora, including through agents operating out of the embassies, in order to punish refugees and defectors,” he said. Refugees who wish to obtain an Eritrean passport are pressured to sign a “form of regret,” admitting that they have committed an offense and agreeing to accept any punishment. They must also disclose the names of family members back home, who may become subject to fines and imprisonment. Sometimes Eritrean security forces seize refugees from camps and residences in Sudan and return them to Eritrea.

  At the mall, the players tried to stay cheerful. In the parking lot, Russom gazed at the people walking toward the entrance. “I’m trying to find Samson a girlfriend,” he said, laughing. But at times they still seemed disoriented by their situation. Arefaine mentioned that he had recently gone to Gaborone to meet with Eritreans living there, and they visited a huge, gleaming shopping mall called Game City. “I was confused. I thought, ‘Is this Europe?’ ” he said, half-jokingly.

  The players missed eating injera and fata and hanging out at the cafés on Harnet Avenue. They missed their friends and families. Arefaine’s older sister Helen told him on Facebook Messenger to be strong, and sent him photos and updates from home. “It makes me homesick, but it’s better than not having any news at all,” he said. Their families have yet to experience repercussions from their defections; the players hope that the team’s high profile will prevent the government from retaliating, but they can’t be certain. “M
y family was angry I left them, and they were afraid,” Arefaine said. “The government is going to do something. I am still afraid.”

  Outside the supermarket, Arefaine surveyed the mall: a stretch of boutiques selling clothing, shoes, books, electronics. “There’s nothing like this in Asmara,” he observed. “It’s nice.” After a moment, he corrected himself. “The cafés in Asmara are better. There’s nothing nicer than the streets of Asmara.” At last, though, he had managed to leave Eritrea. When I asked how it felt, he said, “We are one step ahead from where we were.”

  RUTH PADAWER

  Too Fast to Be Female

  from the new york times magazine

  One day in June 2014, Dutee Chand was cooling down after a set of 200-meter sprints when she received a call from the director of the Athletics Federation of India, asking her to meet him in Delhi. Chand, then 18 and one of India’s fastest runners, was preparing for the coming Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, her first big international event as an adult. Earlier that month, Chand won gold in both the 200-meter sprint and the 4-by-400-meter relay at the Asian Junior Athletics Championships in Taipei, Taiwan, so her hopes for Scotland were high.

  Chand was raised in Gopalpur, a rural village in eastern India with only intermittent electricity. The family home was a small mud hut, with no running water or toilet. Her parents, weavers who earned less than $8 a week laboring on a government-issued loom, were illiterate. They had not imagined a different life for their seven children, but Chand had other ideas. Now, as she took the five-hour bus ride to Delhi from a training center in Punjab, she thought about her impending move to Bangalore for a new training program. She wondered if she would make friends, and how she’d manage there without her beloved coach, who had long been by her side, strategizing about how best to run each race and joking to help her relax whenever she was nervous. She thought little of the meeting in Delhi, because she assumed it was for a doping test.

  But when Chand arrived in Delhi, she says, she was sent to a clinic to meet a doctor from the Athletics Federation of India—the Indian affiliate of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which governs track and field. He told her he would forgo the usual urine and blood tests because no nurse was available, and would order an ultrasound instead. That confused Chand, but when she asked him about it, she recalls, he said it was routine.

  Chand had no idea that her extraordinary showing in Taipei and at a national championship earlier that month had prompted competitors and coaches to tell the federation that her physique seemed suspiciously masculine: her muscles were too pronounced, her stride was too impressive for someone who was only five feet tall. The doctor would later deny that the ultrasound was a response to those reports, saying he ordered the scan only because Chand had previously complained of chronic abdominal pain. She contends she never had any such pain.

  Three days after the ultrasound, the federation sent a letter titled “Subject: Gender Verification Issue” to the Indian government’s sports authority. “It has been brought to the notice of the undersigned that there are definite doubts regarding the gender of an Athlete Ms. Dutee Chand,” the letter read. It also noted that in the past, such cases “have brought embarrassment to the fair name of sports in India.” The letter requested the authorities perform a “gender verification test” on Chand.

  Shortly after, Chand says, she was sent to a private hospital in Bangalore, where a curt woman drew her blood to measure her level of natural testosterone, though Chand had no idea that was what was being measured. Chand also underwent a chromosome analysis, an MRI, and a gynecological exam that she found mortifying. To evaluate the effects of high testosterone, the international athletic association’s protocol involves measuring and palpating the clitoris, vagina, and labia, as well as evaluating breast size and pubic hair scored on an illustrated five-grade scale.

  The tests were meant to identify competitors whose chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, reproductive organs, or secondary sex characteristics don’t develop or align in the typical way. The word “hermaphrodite” is considered stigmatizing, so physicians and advocates instead use the term “intersex” or refer to the condition as DSD, which stands for either a disorder or a difference of sex development. Estimates of the number of intersex people vary widely, ranging from one in 5,000 to one in 60, because experts dispute which of the myriad conditions to include and how to tally them accurately. Some intersex women, for instance, have XX chromosomes and ovaries, but because of a genetic quirk are born with ambiguous genitalia, neither male nor female. Others have XY chromosomes and undescended testes, but a mutation affecting a key enzyme makes them appear female at birth; they’re raised as girls, though at puberty, rising testosterone levels spur a deeper voice, an elongated clitoris, and increased muscle mass. Still other intersex women have XY chromosomes and internal testes but appear female their whole lives, developing rounded hips and breasts, because their cells are insensitive to testosterone. They, like others, may never know their sex development was unusual, unless they’re tested for infertility—or to compete in world-class sports.

  When Chand’s results came in a few days later, the doctor said her “male hormone” levels were too high, meaning she produced more androgens, mostly testosterone, than most women did. The typical female range is roughly 1.0 to 3.3 nanomoles of testosterone per liter of blood, about one-tenth that of typical males. Chand’s level is not publicly known, but it was above the 10-nanomoles-per-liter threshold that the IAAF set for female competitors because that level is within the “male range.” As a result, officials said, she could no longer race.

  In the two years since, Chand has been at the center of a legal case that contests not only her disqualification but also the international policy her lawyers say discriminates against athletes with atypical sex development. For Chand, who had never heard the words “testosterone” or “intersex,” it has been a slow and painful education. When she was first told she was being barred because of her testosterone level, she didn’t understand anything the officials were saying. “I said, ‘What have I done that is wrong?’ ” she told me by phone in May through a Hindi translator. “Then the media got my phone number and started calling me and asking about an androgen test, and I had no idea what an androgen test was. The media asked, ‘Did you have a gender test?’ And I said, ‘What is a gender test?’ ”

  No governing body has so tenaciously tried to determine who counts as a woman for the purpose of sports as the IAAF and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Those two influential organizations have spent a half-century vigorously policing gender boundaries. Their rationale for decades was to catch male athletes masquerading as women, though they never once discovered an impostor. Instead, the athletes snagged in those efforts have been intersex women—scores of them.

  The treatment of female athletes, and intersex women in particular, has a long and sordid history. For centuries, sport was the exclusive province of males, the competitive arena where masculinity was cultivated and proven. Sport endowed men with the physical and psychological strength that “manhood” required. As women in the late 19th century encroached on explicitly male domains—sport, education, paid labor—many in society became increasingly anxious; if a woman’s place wasn’t immutable, maybe a man’s role, and the power it entailed, were not secure either.

  Well into the 20th century, women were discouraged from participating in sports. Some medical experts claimed that vigorous exercise would damage women’s reproductive capacity and their fragile emotional state and would make them muscular, “mannish,” and unattractive to men. Critics fretted that athletics would unbind women from femininity’s modesty and self-restraint.

  As women athletes’ strength and confidence grew, some observers began to wonder if fast, powerful athletes could even be women. In the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the runners Stella Walsh of Poland and Helen Stephens of the United States were rumored to be male impostors because of their remarkable athlet
icism, “male-like” muscles, and angular faces. After Stephens narrowly beat Walsh in the 100-meter dash and posted a world record, Stephens was publicly accused of being a man, by Walsh or Polish journalists—accounts vary. German Olympics officials had examined Stephens’s genitals before the event and declared her female. Four decades later, in an unexpected twist, an autopsy of Walsh revealed she had ambiguous genitalia.

  In 1938, the gender of an athlete was again in dispute. The German high-jumper Dora Ratjen, a former fourth-place Olympian who won a gold medal at the European Athletics Championship, was suddenly identified as male, prompting Germany to quietly return the medal. When Ratjen’s case became public years later—he claimed that the Nazis pressured him to pose as a woman for three years—it validated the growing anxiety about gender fraud in athletics. But in 2009, the magazine Der Spiegel investigated medical and police records and found Ratjen had been born with ambiguous genitals but, at the midwife’s suggestion, was raised as a girl, dressed in girls’ clothes, and sent to girls’ schools. Dora lived as a female until two years after the 1936 Olympics, when police were alerted to a train traveler in women’s clothes who looked suspiciously masculine. With relief so apparent that the police noted it in their report, Ratjen told them that despite his parents’ claims, he had long suspected he was male. A police physician examined him and agreed, but reported that Ratjen’s genitals were atypical. Ratjen changed his first name from Dora to Heinrich. But those details were unknown until recently, so for decades, Ratjen was considered a gender cheat.