The Best American Sports Writing 2017

by Glenn Stout

  By the mid-1940s, international sports administrators began requiring female competitors to bring medical “femininity certificates” to verify their sex. In the 1950s, many Olympics officials were so uneasy about women’s participation that Prince Franz Josef of Liechtenstein, a member of the International Olympic Committee, spoke for many when he said he wanted to “be spared the unesthetic spectacle of women trying to look and act like men,” writes Susan K. Cahn, a history professor at the University at Buffalo, in her book Coming On Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sports. Others were particularly bothered by women in track and field because of the strained expressions on their faces during competition. Such female exertion violated the white middle-class ideal of femininity, as did the athletes’ “masculinized” physiques, prompting Olympic leaders to consider eliminating those events for women.

  In 1952, the Soviet Union joined the Olympics, stunning the world with the success and brawn of its female athletes. That year, women accounted for 23 of the Soviet Union’s 71 medals, compared with eight of America’s 76 medals. As the Olympics became another front in the Cold War, rumors spread in the 1960s that Eastern-Bloc female athletes were men who bound their genitals to rake in more wins.

  Though those claims were never substantiated, in 1966 international sports officials decided they couldn’t trust individual nations to certify femininity, and instead implemented a mandatory genital check of every woman competing at international games. In some cases, this involved what came to be called the “nude parade,” as each woman appeared, underpants down, before a panel of doctors; in others, it involved women lying on their backs and pulling their knees to their chest for closer inspection. Several Soviet women who had dominated international athletics abruptly dropped out, cementing popular conviction that the Soviets had been tricking authorities. (More recently, some researchers have speculated that those athletes may have been intersex.)

  Amid complaints about the genital checks, the IAAF and the IOC introduced a new “gender verification” strategy in the late ’60s: a chromosome test. Officials considered that a more dignified, objective way to root out not only impostors but also intersex athletes, who, Olympic officials said, needed to be barred to ensure fair play. Ewa Kłobukowska, a Polish sprinter, was among the first to be ousted because of that test; she was reportedly found to have both XX and XXY chromosomes. An editorial in the IOC magazine in 1968 insisted the chromosome test “indicates quite definitely the sex of a person,” but many geneticists and endocrinologists disagreed, pointing out that sex was determined by a confluence of genetic, hormonal, and physiological factors, not any one alone. Relying on science to arbitrate the male-female divide in sports is fruitless, they said, because science could not draw a line that nature itself refused to draw. They also argued that the tests discriminated against those whose anomalies provided little or no competitive edge and traumatized women who had spent their whole lives certain they were female, only to be told they were not female enough to participate.

  One of those competitors was Maria José Martínez Patiño, a 24-year-old Spanish hurdler who was to run at the 1985 World University Games in Japan. The night before the race, a team official told her that her chromosome test results were abnormal. A more detailed investigation showed that although the outside of her body was fully female, Patiño had XY chromosomes and internal testes. But because of a genetic mutation, her cells completely resisted the testosterone she produced, so her body actually had access to less testosterone than a typical woman. Just before the Spanish national championships began, Spanish athletic officials told her she should feign an injury and withdraw from athletics permanently and without fuss. She refused. Instead, she ran the 60-meter hurdles and won, at which point someone leaked her test results to the press. Patiño was thrown off the national team, expelled from the athletes’ residence, and denied her scholarship. Her boyfriend and many friends and fellow athletes abandoned her. Her medals and records were revoked.

  Patiño became the first athlete to formally protest the chromosome test and to argue that disqualification was unjustified. After nearly three years, the IAAF agreed that without being able to use testosterone, her body had no advantage, and it reinstated Patiño. But by then, her hopes for making the Olympics were dashed.

  Dutee Chand was only four when she started running, tagging along with her sister, Saraswati, a competitive runner who liked to practice sprints along the local Brahmani River. Saraswati found training boring, so she recruited Dutee, 10 years her junior, to keep her company. For years, Dutee ran in bare feet—even on the village’s mud-and-pebble streets—because she had to protect the only shoes she owned: flimsy rubber flip-flops that she knew her parents could not afford to replace.

  When Dutee was about seven, her parents pressed her to stop running and learn to weave instead. But Saraswati argued that with Dutee’s speed, she could earn more as a sprinter. Saraswati, who has since become a police officer, reminded her parents of the benefits her own running had brought to the family. Once the district government realized Saraswati’s athletic potential, she, like other athletes, was given meat and chicken and eggs, food her family had not been able to afford. And she reminded them of the prize money she brought home whenever she did well in marathons. They agreed to let Dutee run.

  Not long after, Saraswati used a string to measure Dutee’s foot and took a bus to the nearest city, about 60 miles away, to find an affordable pair of sturdy sneakers for her sister. The ride took three hours, frequently picking up passengers carrying goats or chickens and large bundles. When Saraswati gave Dutee the sneakers the next morning, Saraswati told me over the phone through a translator, Dutee yelped. “She asked me what can happen if she runs wholeheartedly. She asked if she would go abroad like me, and said she had never sat in a bus or a train, and asked where the money will come from for her to go abroad. I said that ‘if, with these shoes, you run well, you will be sent abroad from the money that will come to you, and not just that, but you’ll also get a tracksuit. So run!’ ”

  In 2006, 10-year-old Dutee was accepted into a state-sponsored sports program more than two hours from the family’s home. Food, lodging, and training were covered. She missed home but appreciated the dorm’s electricity, running water, and indoor toilets. And she was happy she could send prize money to her parents.

  That same year, though Dutee didn’t know it, a catastrophe was unfolding for another Indian sprinter. Santhi Soundarajan, a 25-year-old from southern India, finished second in the 800 meters at the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, all the more impressive given her roots as a member of India’s impoverished “untouchable” caste. The previous decade, the IOC and IAAF yielded to pressure by the medical and scientific community and stopped sex-testing every female athlete. But the groups retained the right to test an athlete’s chromosomes when questions about her sex arose and to follow that with a hormone test, a gynecological exam, and a psychological evaluation.

  In Soundarajan’s case, the media noted that she wasn’t just fast; she also had a deep voice and a flat chest. The day after Soundarajan’s race, the Athletics Federation of India drew her blood and examined her body. Some of her results were leaked to the media. Shortly after, Soundarajan was watching TV when she saw a news report that she had “failed” a sex test. Rejected by the local sports federations, stripped of her silver medal, tormented by ongoing scrutiny, and unbearably embarrassed, she attempted suicide, reportedly by swallowing poison.

  As Chand began competing in national athletics, another runner from a poor rural village, this time in South Africa, burst onto the international athletic stage. When Caster Semenya blew by her opponents in the 800-meter race at the 2009 African Junior Championships, her performance raised suspicions. Shortly after, sports officials tested her as she prepared for the World Athletics Championship. Unconcerned—she assumed the investigation was for doping—Semenya won gold again. Almost immediately, the fact that Semenya had been sex
-tested was leaked to the press. Instead of attending what is normally the celebratory news conference, Semenya went into hiding. The IAAF spokesman Nick Davies announced that if Semenya was an impostor, she could be stripped of her medal. He added: “However, if it’s a natural thing, and the athlete has always thought she’s a woman or been a woman, it’s not exactly cheating.”

  Fellow athletes, the press, and commenters on social media scrutinized Semenya’s body and made much of her supposed gender transgressions: her muscular physique, her deep voice, her flexed-biceps pose, her unshaved armpits, the long shorts she ran in instead of bikini shorts, in addition to her extraordinary speed. A story on Time magazine’s website was headlined “Could This Women’s World Champ Be a Man?” One of Semenya’s competitors, Elisa Cusma of Italy, who came in sixth, said: “These kind of people should not run with us. For me, she is not a woman. She is a man.” The Russian star runner Mariya Savinova reportedly sneered, “Just look at her.” (The World Anti-Doping Agency would later accuse Savinova of using performance-enhancing drugs and recommend a lifetime ban.) The IAAF general secretary, Pierre Weiss, said of Semenya, “She is a woman, but maybe not 100 percent.” Unlike India, South Africa filed a human rights complaint with the United Nations arguing that the IAAF’s testing of Semenya was “both sexist and racist.” Semenya herself would later write in a statement, “I have been subjected to unwarranted and invasive scrutiny of the most intimate and private details of my being.”

  After nearly a year of negotiations (the details of which are not public) the IAAF cleared Semenya to run in 2010, and she went on to win the silver medal in the 2012 Olympics. She will be running in Rio. But the federation still faced condemnation over leaks, public smears, and the very idea of a sex test. The IAAF maintained it was obliged to protect female athletes from having “to compete against athletes with hormone-related performance advantages commonly associated with men.” In 2011, the association announced that it would abandon all references to “gender verification” or “gender policy.” Instead, it would institute a test for “hyperandrogenism” (high testosterone) when there are “reasonable grounds for believing” that a woman may have the condition. Women whose testosterone level was “within the male range” would be barred. There were two exceptions: if a woman like Maria Patiño was resistant to testosterone’s effects—or if a woman reduced her testosterone. This entails having her undescended testes surgically removed or taking hormone-suppressing drugs.

  Not long after the policy went into effect, sports officials referred four female athletes from “rural or mountainous regions of developing countries” to a French hospital to reduce their high testosterone, according to a 2013 article in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. The authors, many of whom were physicians who treated the women, describe telling them that leaving in their internal testes “carries no health risk,” but that removing them would allow the athletes to resume competition, though possibly hurt their performance. The women, who were between 18 and 21, agreed to the procedure. The physicians treating them also recommended surgically reducing their large clitorises to make them look more typical. The article doesn’t mention whether they told their patients that altering their clitorises might impair sexual sensation, but it does say the women agreed to that surgery too.

  Chand was unaware of any controversy surrounding Semenya or other intersex athletes. Her gender concerns were much more immediate: she saw other 15-year-old girls becoming curvier and heard them talk about getting their periods. She asked her mother why her body wasn’t doing the same thing, and trusted her answer: Chand’s body would change when it was good and ready.

  In 2012, Chand advanced to a national-level athletic training program, which in addition to food and lodging provided a stipend. At 16, she also became a national champion in the under-18 category, winning the 100 meters in 11.8 seconds. The next year, she won gold in the 100 meters and the 200 meters. In June 2014, she won gold yet again at the Asian Championships in Taipei.

  Not long after that, she received the call to go to Delhi and was tested. After her results came in, officials told her she could return to the national team only if she reduced her testosterone level—and that she wouldn’t be allowed to compete for a year. The particulars of her results were not made public, but the media learned, and announced, that Chand had “failed” a “gender test” and wasn’t a “normal” woman. For days, Chand cried inconsolably and refused to eat or drink. “Some in the news were saying I was a boy, and some said that maybe I was a transsexual,” Chand told me. “I felt naked. I am a human being, but I felt I was an animal. I wondered how I would live with so much humiliation.”

  As news spread that Chand had been dropped from the national team, advocates encouraged her to fight back. Payoshni Mitra, an Indian researcher with a doctorate in gender issues in sport who had advocated on behalf of other intersex athletes, suggested Chand send a letter to the Athletics Federation of India, requesting her disqualification be reversed. “I have not doped or cheated,” Chand said in Hindi, and Mitra, who would become Chand’s government-appointed adviser, translated to English. “I am unable to understand why I am asked to fix my body in a certain way simply for participation as a woman. I was born a woman, reared up as a woman, I identify as a woman and I believe I should be allowed to compete with other women, many of whom are either taller than me or come from more privileged backgrounds, things that most certainly give them an edge over me.”

  Mitra and others also urged Chand to take her case to the international Court of Arbitration for Sport—the Supreme Court for sports disputes—arguing that the IAAF’s testosterone policy was discriminatory and should be rescinded. She agreed. Over four days in March 2015, a three-judge panel heard Chand’s appeal, as a total of 16 witnesses, including scientists, sports officials, and athletes, testified.

  Female athletes, intersex and not, wondered just how this case would affect their lives. At the hearing, Paula Radcliffe, the British runner who holds the women’s world record for the marathon, testified for the IAAF, saying elevated testosterone levels “make the competition unequal in a way greater than simple natural talent and dedication.” She added, “The concern remains that their bodies respond in different, stronger ways to training and racing than women with normal testosterone levels, and that this renders the competition fundamentally unfair.”

  Madeleine Pape, a 2008 Olympian from Australia, testified for Chand. Pape lost to Caster Semenya in the 2009 World Championships, Semenya’s last race before her sex-test results were made public. Pape had heard runners complain that Semenya was a man or had male-like advantages, and she was angry that Semenya seemed to win so easily. “At the time, I felt that people like Caster shouldn’t be allowed to compete,” Pape told me. But in 2012, Pape began work on a sociology PhD focusing on women in sport. “With my running days behind me, I had the space to think more critically about all that,” she says. “Until that point, I had no idea that the science of sex differences is extremely contested and has shifted over time, as have the regulations in sports, which change but don’t improve as they try to get at the same questions.”

  Just what role testosterone plays in improving athletic performance is still being debated. At the hearing, both sides agreed that synthetic testosterone—doping with anabolic steroids—does ramp up performance, helping male and female athletes jump higher and run faster. But they disagreed vehemently about whether the body’s own testosterone has the same effect.

  IAAF witnesses testified that logic suggests that natural testosterone is likely to work the way its synthetic twin does. They pointed to decades of IAAF and IOC testing showing that a disproportionate number of elite female athletes, particularly in track and field, have XY chromosomes; by their estimates, the presence of the Y chromosome in this group is more than 140 times higher than it is among the general female population. Surely, witnesses for the IAAF argued, that overrepresentation indicated that natural testosterone has an
outsize influence on athletic prowess.

  Chand’s witnesses countered that even if natural testosterone turns out to play a role in improving performance, testosterone alone can’t explain the overrepresentation of intersex elite athletes; after all, many of those XY female athletes had low testosterone or had cells that lacked androgen receptors. At the Atlanta Games in 1996, one of the few times the IOC allowed detailed intersex-related data to be released, seven of the eight women who were found to have a Y chromosome turned out to be androgen-insensitive: their bodies couldn’t use the testosterone they made. Some geneticists speculate that the overrepresentation might be because of a gene on the Y chromosome that increases stature; height is clearly beneficial in several sports, though that certainly isn’t a factor for Chand.

  In court, the IAAF acknowledged that men’s natural testosterone levels, no matter how high, were not regulated; the rationale, it said, was that there was no evidence that men with exceptionally high testosterone have a competitive advantage. Pressed by Chand’s lawyer, the IAAF also conceded that no research had actually proved that unusually high levels of natural testosterone lead to unusually impressive sports performance in women either. Nor has any study proved that natural testosterone in the “male range” provides women with a competitive advantage commensurate with the 10 to 12 percent advantage that elite male athletes typically have over elite female athletes in comparable events. In fact, the IAAF’s own witnesses estimated the performance advantage of women with high testosterone to be between 1 and 3 percent, and the court played down the 3 percent figure, because it was based on limited, unpublished data.

  Chand’s witnesses also pointed out that researchers had identified more than 200 biological abnormalities that offer specific competitive advantages, among them increased aerobic capacity, resistance to fatigue, exceptionally long limbs, flexible joints, large hands and feet, and increased numbers of fast-twitch muscle fibers—all of which make the idea of a level playing field illusory, and not one of which is regulated if it is innate.