by Glenn Stout
Bruce Kidd, a former long-distance Olympic runner, told me in May that Olympians themselves sometimes joke that they’re all freaks of nature, with one or another genetic abnormality that makes them great at what they do. Kidd, a Canadian who has long pushed for gender equity in sports, noted that there are also many external variables that influence performance: access to excellent coaching, training facilities, healthy nutrition, and so on. “If athletic officials really want to address the significant factors affecting advantage, they should require all athletes to live in the same place, in the same level of wealth, with access to the same resources,” he says. “Boy, oh, boy, there are so many unfair advantages many Olympians have, starting with who their parents are.”
But the IAAF argued that testosterone is different from other factors, because it is responsible for the performance gap between the sexes. That gap is the very reason sports is divided by sex, the IAAF says, so regulating testosterone is therefore justified.
Chand’s hearing, though, was about more than just testosterone. Implicitly, it questioned the decades of relentless scrutiny of female athletes—especially the most successful ones. Veronica Brenner, a Canadian who won a silver medal in freestyle skiing in 2002, told me she first learned that female Olympians had to pass a sex test when she arrived at the ’98 Games in Nagano, Japan. “I said: ‘Are you kidding?’ I’d been competing my whole life, and my gender has never been questioned!” Brenner’s test confirmed that she had XX chromosomes, and she was given what was commonly called a “femininity card” to prove she was the gender she claimed to be. But she was irked that despite the many advances of female athletes in the last half-century, powerful male athletes are celebrated and powerful female ones are suspect. “We’d hear comments all the time: ‘She’s really strong—she must be part guy.’ ”
Other critics see testosterone testing as simply the old “gender verification,” the latest effort to keep out women who don’t adhere to gender norms or have a standard female body. Katrina Karkazis, a bioethicist at Stanford University who is a leader of the international campaign against banning intersex athletes and who testified in Chand’s case, says that if an athlete’s androgen test shows she has high testosterone, she must undergo the same gynecological exam that has existed for decades. “The rationale behind the IAAF’s ‘hyperandrogenism regulation’ is to make it sound more scientifically justifiable and less discriminatory, but nothing in those exams has changed from the old policy except the name,” she says. “It’s still based on very rigid binary ideas about sex and gender.”
Critics of the IAAF policy argue that if sports officials were truly concerned about fairness, they would quit policing a handful of women with naturally high testosterone and instead rigorously investigate athletes suspected of taking drugs that indisputably enhance performance. They note that in the last year, the IAAF has faced bribery and blackmail charges and widespread allegations that it intentionally ignored hundreds of suspicious blood tests.
Stéphane Bermon, an IAAF witness who took part in the efforts to identify females with high testosterone, acknowledged that doping was a significant threat to fairness but said that didn’t negate the need to also regulate the participation of women with naturally high testosterone who may have an advantage. He offered an analogy: “Air pollution, like tobacco smoking, contributes to lung cancer, but one should never have to choose between these two before implementing prevention measures,” he wrote in an email. “As a governing body, IAAF has to do its best to ensure a level playing field . . . These two topics are different but can lead to the same consequence, which is the impossibility for a dedicated athlete to compete and succeed against an opponent who benefits from an unfair advantage.”
Last July, the Court of Arbitration for Sport issued its ruling in Dutee Chand’s case. The three-judge panel concluded that although natural testosterone may play some role in athleticism, just what that role is, and how influential it is, remains unknown. As a result, the judges said that the IAAF’s policy was not justified by current scientific research: “While the evidence indicates that higher levels of naturally occurring testosterone may increase athletic performance, the Panel is not satisfied that the degree of that advantage is more significant than the advantage derived from the numerous other variables which the parties acknowledge also affect female athletic performance: for example, nutrition, access to specialist training facilities and coaching and other genetic and biological variations.”
The judges concluded that requiring women like Chand to change their bodies in order to compete was unjustifiably discriminatory. The panel suspended the policy until July 2017 to give the IAAF time to prove that the degree of competitive advantage conferred by naturally high testosterone in women was comparable to men’s advantage. If the IAAF doesn’t supply that evidence, the court said, the regulation “shall be declared void.” It was the first time the court had ever overruled a sport-governing body’s entire policy.
Chand was thrilled. “This wasn’t just about me,” she said, “but about all women like me, who come from difficult backgrounds. It is mostly people from poor backgrounds who come into running—people who know they will get food, housing, a job, if they run well. Richer people can pay their way to become doctors, engineers; poor people don’t even know about their own medical challenges.”
Chand hoped that the ruling would prompt the IOC to suspend its testosterone policy too, so she would be eligible to try to qualify for the Rio Games. After all, the IOC policy—which also called on national Olympic committees to “investigate any perceived deviation in sex characteristics”—was based on the same science that the court deemed inadequate.
In November 2015, the IOC established new parameters for dealing with gender. But it never actually addressed whether it would suspend its testosterone policy, as the IAAF was forced to do. That ambiguity left intersex athletes in limbo. Finally, in late February, the IOC said it would not regulate women’s natural testosterone levels “until the issues of the case are resolved.” It urged the IAAF to come up with the evidence by the court’s deadline so the suspended policy could be resurrected. It also said that to avoid discrimination, high-testosterone women who are ineligible to compete against women should be eligible to compete against men.
Advocates for intersex women were dismayed. “It’s ridiculous,” says Payoshni Mitra, the Indian researcher. “They say the policy is not for testing gender—but saying that a hyperandrogenic woman can compete as a man, not a woman, inherently means they think she really is a man, not a woman. It brings back the debate around an athlete’s gender, publicly humiliating her in the process.” Emmanuelle Moreau, head of media relations for the IOC, disagreed, writing in an email, “It is a question of eligibility, not gender or (biological) sex.”
A separate section of the IOC gender guidelines addressed a different group of atypical women (and atypical men): transgender athletes. Unlike the intersex section, the transgender section stresses the importance of human rights, nondiscrimination, and inclusion. It eschews most of the IOC’s former requirements, including that trans competitors have their ovaries or testicles removed and undergo surgery so their external genitalia matches their gender identity. In the new guidelines, female-to-male athletes face no restrictions of any kind; male-to-female athletes have some restrictions, including suppressing their testosterone levels below the typical male range. And once they’ve declared their gender as female, they can’t change it again for four years if they want to compete in sports.
Reactions among trans advocates ran the gamut. Many trans advocates viewed the liberalized regulations as a victory. But some transwomen athletes who long ago had their testicles removed (and as a result, make virtually no testosterone) were unhappy with the policy; they argued that lifting the surgery requirement gave transwomen who still had testosterone-producing testicles an unfair advantage over transwomen who didn’t. And still other advocates said that requiring transwomen to suppress their
testosterone below 10 nanomoles is premised on the very same claim about testosterone that the court rejected—that naturally made testosterone is the primary cause of men’s competitive advantage over women.
Without evidence that “male range” testosterone levels really do provide that advantage, some say it’s premature to base a policy on speculation—especially one that requires people to transform their bodies. In May, the Canadian Center for Ethics in Sports, which manages the country’s antidoping program and recommends ethics standards, issued trans-related guidelines for all Canadian sports organizations. The statement says policies that regulate eligibility, like those related to hormones, should be backed by defensible science. It adds, “There is simply not the evidence to suggest whether, or to what degree, hormone levels consistently confer competitive advantage.” And yet it’s hard to imagine that many female athletes would easily accept the idea of competing against transwomen athletes without those regulations in place.
Those debates are far from Chand’s thoughts. Her focus now is on making the most of the window the ruling provides: allowing her to try to qualify for next month’s Olympics without having to change her body. In the miserable months after her test results were revealed, Chand’s training time and concentration were interrupted, and her hope of ever competing seemed out of reach. Once the ruling was issued, though, she returned to the Indian national team, and intensified her training for the 100 meters, the 200 meters, and the 400-meter relay. In addition to working out six hours a day, she tries to relax with naps and Facebook. She has made frequent trips to nations holding qualifying competitions. In May, she competed in India, China, and Taiwan; in June, in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. She has until July 11 to meet the IOC time requirement.
She is painfully aware that if she doesn’t make this summer’s Olympics, she may not have another chance. The IAAF may still come up with evidence that satisfies the court and would exclude women like her from competing without altering their bodies. Chand’s best shot to qualify for Rio is in the 100 meters, which she must complete in 11.32 seconds or less. She remains one-hundredth of a second short.
S. L. PRICE
The Longest Run
from sports illustrated and time
They ran. So goes the first act of a refugee: a scramble for food or clothing, a grab of the nearest helping hand, flight. Were the soldiers coming to take territory? Coming for forced conscripts the way they did two years before, when Yiech Pur Biel’s father ran and never came back? In those first moments it didn’t matter; the soldiers were coming. So Biel and his mother, two sisters, and younger brother rushed out of their home, five more drops in the human flood rushing into the scrubby forest outside the town of Nasir, in the northeast of what would soon become South Sudan.
This was 2005. What month? Biel doesn’t remember. What season? He can’t say. He was 10 then, an age when time means little but the loss of home feels like the earth cracking. “When they attacked us,” he says, “I saw it was the end of my life with my family.”
It got worse. Biel—who would grow up intent on proving, along with the nine other members of the Refugee Olympic Team at the Rio Games, that refugees “are not animals”—then took what is often the next step. He lived like an animal. Hiding in the bush, senses on high alert, no food to be had. For three days his family, sleepless, bellies screaming, foraged for fruit and climbed trees for their bitter leaves.
Finally Biel’s mother, Nyagony, made a decision. The border with Ethiopia was only 19 miles away, a week’s walk; maybe they could get food there. Biel was the oldest boy. There was no avoiding the cruel calculus: She could handle three children on the road but not four. “You see,” Biel says, “if I am 10 years, I can survive without her, maybe.”
He tried to understand. His mother placed him with a woman from their neighborhood, gathered his brother and sisters, and went. So began the refugee’s third, most wrenching act, the separation endured worldwide, in some form, by more than 21 million refugees and another 44 million forcibly displaced people. Biel has not spoken to his mother and siblings since then. He doesn’t know if they survived the trek, the soldiers, the years.
While relating all this in July, during a break at the Tegla Loroupe Training Center in Ngong, Kenya, about 14 miles outside Nairobi, the 21-year-old Biel speaks in a high monotone, his face giving away nothing. He says he cried the day his mother left him, but it wasn’t his worst moment. That came after, when he went with the neighbor lady and her two children back to Nasir and found his hometown in ashes. “They burned everything,” he says of the soldiers. “There was nothing: the village has gone. They took animals, even killed some. The army go away. All that remained were the dead people.”
That’s when Biel knew: he was lost. The neighbor lady would be going now, surely, and he was terrified that she too would do the math, “turn against me,” and leave him behind. “I thought it was my end,” he says. So for the next 24 hours, one full day, the boy waited for his dying to begin.
When International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach announced the 10 members of the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team in June—after a yearlong global vetting by 17 national Olympic committees and the United Nations Refugee Agency and after countless tryouts in Europe and Africa that resembled nothing so much as the hunt for Willy Wonka’s golden tickets—he clearly intended the impact to redound far beyond sports. “A symbol of hope to all the refugees in our world,” Bach called the squad. “It is also a signal to the international community that refugees are our fellow human beings and are an enrichment to society.
“These refugees have no home, no team, no flag, no national anthem. We will offer them a home in the Olympic Village together with all the athletes of the world.”
A cynic might call this a stroke of marketing genius. What with endless reports out of Rio about depleted budgets, political collapse, social unrest, the Zika virus, and the consequent withdrawal of high-profile athletes; amid striking allegations of systematic doping by traditional powers Russia and Kenya; and after making laughable bets that staging recent Olympics in China and Russia would improve those countries’ human rights records, the Olympic brand has taken a savage beating. A bit of humanitarian counterprogramming, smacking of Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s ideals, surely couldn’t hurt.
“We need to remind [people] that sport is a unique tool to improve society,” says Pere Miró, whose IOC title is deputy director general for relations with the Olympic movement. “This is . . . a kind of hope for some people that can get us back to our roots.”
To be fair, Bach had been thinking about pairing the worldwide refugee crisis—the worst since World War II—and the Olympics almost from the moment he took office in September 2013. Tegla Loroupe, the Kenyan marathon legend, had been scouting and training talented South Sudanese refugees for years; Bach spoke to her that fall about expanding the work worldwide, and last September the IOC authorized $2 million in funding for the effort. “I was always wishing that I had somebody to help me,” says Loroupe, whose training camp welcomed 30 refugee runners last October. “If it was not for IOC, I couldn’t support these athletes.”
Meanwhile, the crisis is so great, and the journeys of some athletes have been so harrowing, that the Refugee Team’s march into Maracanã Stadium under the Olympic flag during the opening ceremony, just before Brazil’s delegation, figures to be irresistible. There will be swimmer Yusra Mardini, 18, of Syria, where a five-year civil war has killed more than 400,000 people and scattered four million refugees across the Middle East and Europe. In the summer of 2015, Mardini, one of Syria’s top freestylers, boarded an inflatable dinghy in Izmir, Turkey, bound for the Greek island of Lesbos. When the boat’s motor died, she jumped into the Aegean Sea with her older sister, Sarah, and another refugee and kicked for three hours, pushing and pulling the boat to safety. “I hated the sea after that,” Yusra said at a news conference in March.
Land didn’t treat her much better. The women trekked and
rode trains for 25 days through Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary (where they were detained in a refugee camp before escaping), and Austria before settling in Berlin. By late autumn Mardini had found a pool and a coach. Her compatriot Rami Anis, 25, a butterflyer, was not far behind.
Shaken by the bombings and kidnappings in his hometown of Aleppo, Anis had flown to Istanbul in 2011 with two pairs of pants, two T-shirts, and two jackets, expecting to stay there with an older brother for a short time. Four years later, one night in October, Anis paid smugglers to ferry him and his younger brother from Izmir to the Greek island of Samos. It took another nine days for them to travel overland through Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Austria, and Germany to Belgium, where they decided to stay.
“The part at sea was the worst,” Anis says. “As a swimmer, I was worried because we were going to take a raft with children and old people. You have to imagine everything: What if the boat toppled? Of course, I would not only swim and rescue my life . . . I would try to help as many people as possible. It was terrible to go through this experience. Thankfully, it passed.”
The Syrian war, of course, was the main source of the more than one million refugees who flowed into Europe in 2015, a surge that, paired with fears of terrorism, is challenging (and often transforming) the politics, culture, and self-image of every country from Greece to Great Britain. But long-standing conflict, drought, and instability also scattered 160,000 Ethiopians in that time, including Refugee Team marathoner Yonas Kinde, 36, who has been living, running, and driving taxis in Luxembourg since 2011. “I left because of political problems,” Kinde told the IOC, “but I am here and I am lucky.”