“On a comparative size basis, men can never compete in running and jumping, in swimming, or in other athletic activities with other more specialized animals and insects, nor is he supposed to. Our ideal is not the development of athletic freaks. The Olympic ideal is the complete man.”
That was Avery Brundage, President of the International Olympic Committee, delivering a speech to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R on the value of the Olympics and their ideals in 1946. The idea of creating a complete person, with not only a strong mind but strong body and character, has always been at the forefront of the International Olympic Committee’s explanation for the significance of its mission. “The important thing is not to win,” said Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the leader of the movement to restore the Games at the close of the 19th century, “but to take part.”
That, obviously, does not apply to South African 800 meter runner Caster Semenya, one of the most dominant runners in the distance in recent memory, gender regardless. Semenya has been fighting a battle against the IAAF (International Association of Athletic Federations), which has ruled to bar her from competing as a women due to the IAAF’s gender test, which ruled that she is ineligible to compete as a women due to her naturally high levels of testosterone, which the IAAF refers to as a “male hormone.”
Semenya won the gold medal in the Women’s 800 meter dash at both the 2012 London Games and the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games and has also won the gold in the 800 at the past three World Championships (2009, 2013 and 2017). She hasn’t been beaten in any 800 meter race since 2015. She possesses a level of dominance few athletes, male or female, have exhibited in recent memory.
The IOC and IAAF make the claim that rules like those barring Semenya from competing against other women are about leveling the playing field. The Court for Arbitration in Sport (CAS) said the rule that will ban Semenya unless she subjects herself to medication that will reduce her testosterone levels is valid because, “On the basis of the evidence submitted by the parties, such discrimination is a necessary, reasonable and proportionate means of achieving the IAAF’s aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics in the restricted events.”
One question I think we all need to get in the habit of asking powerful people whenever they make a claim: “For whom?” Who benefits from the so-called “integrity of female athletics in the restricted events?” In order to answer that question, I think we need to examine this Olympic ideal and the original reason we have sex-discriminated athletics in the first place.
The first of Baron de Coubertin’s revived Olympics, the 1896 Games, had zero women participants. Reluctantly, the Olympics added a few women-only events — two for the 1900 edition and five by 1912. Baron de Coubertin was one of the Muscular Christians of the mid-19th century, an ideology that took as its guiding principle the idea that industrial society was breeding a new type of male, sedentary and feminized.
The true goal of the Olympics (and many other sporting institutions created in the late 1800s) was to fight against this feminizing tide by making athletics into a core part of the western male’s life, as core as religion, if not more so. As de Coubertin, a Jesuit, said of the Games, “The first essential characteristic of the Olympics, both ancient as well as modern, is to be a religion ... above and outside the churches.”
He also said the inclusion of women would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and incorrect.” Many agreed with his claim, suggesting either that women were too fragile to compete, or that including them in athletics would rob them of the delicacy that (for the men who decide these things, at least) defines femininity. (Ignore, for now, that these justifications entirely oppose each other.)
Little changed until a group of women took matters into their own hands. French athlete Alice Milliat created the International Women’s Sport Federation and they organized a Women’s Olympiad, which took place in Monaco in 1921 and featured athletes from five European nations. The press generated by the event, later named the Women’s World Games after the use of “Olympiad” ruffled feathers at the IOC, eventually helped to force the IOC’s hand in including women further in their events, however reluctantly — IOC chairman Henri de Baillet-Latour said in 1931 that he hoped women would eventually be fully excluded from the games, just as they were in 1896.
Let’s get back to the original question: Whom are these rules actually for? The science suggests these rules do nothing to actually level the playing field. From a Scientific American editorial on Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, another woman of color subjected to the same discriminatory and creepy gender scrutiny as Semenya in recent years:
“There is no scientific basis for barring these women. Hormone levels akin to Chand's are natural, and there is no evidence that they enhance performance (unlike the doping efforts of the Russian team during the 2014 Sochi Winter Games that were revealed this past spring). Worse, attempts to reduce high testosterone levels below levels specified by the IOC carry serious medical risks for women.”
The playing field, as anybody who has competed in athletics (or anything, really) knows, is never really level. Some have the money to purchase sophisticated equipment that can mask a lack of skill; some don’t. Some grow to be 6-foot-6, others don’t. Some win the genetic lottery and inherit a bone structure or cellular makeup that helps excel at one sport or another; others don’t. It would be ridiculous to claim that legendary swimmer Michael Phelps should have to give up his gold medals because he has the torso of a man nearly half a foot taller than him, giving him a gigantic competitive advantage in the pool. Should he have had to take medication or undergo surgery to compete with a “normal” torso?
The ideology of de Coubertin’s Olympics and the Muscular Christians as a whole was built primarily on enforcing the gender binary, and specifically the role of men as physically dominant. From the beginning, every single rule the IOC has ever instituted with regards to gender has been meant to reinforce this idea. Women were excluded in the beginning because the Olympic ideal was, very specifically, the “complete man.” When women were allowed in, they were limited to certain events because success in these events did not threaten the dichotomy of the physically dominant male and the frail female. And when women started threatening to show special talent in spotlight track events, like Semenya has over the past decade or like intersex Polish sprinter Ewa Klobukowska did in the 1960s, the IOC has responded by cooking up rules like the testosterone test or a chromosome test to justify their bans.
Neither test proves the athletes have been granted a competitive advantage via their genetics or body chemistry. But that, of course, was never the point. What these rules do accomplish is to allow the IOC and those who subscribe to the Olympic ideal to continue to believe in an absolute split between men and women, no matter how much science exists to show that the line they draw between the two is blurry, at best.
The IOC will always claim that these discriminatory and predatory rules, rules that threaten to bar one of the world’s greatest athletes from practicing her trade, exist to protect other women.
But to me, the history is clear. More than anything else, the mere existence of Semenya threatens the Olympic ideal of what Brundage’s “complete man” and, we can assume, the complementing “complete woman” are supposed to be. And for that, Semenya — and anyone like her — must be punished.
One could easily argue that philosophy doesn’t live up to the original Olympic ideal, Baron de Coubertin’s claim that it is not about the winning, but the participation. But I think it demands an entire re-evaluation of the Olympics. At no point in its history could someone like Semenya fit into the original Olympic ideal. This is not Semenya’s problem, but a problem with the Olympic ideal, and if it can’t be fixed, perhaps we ought to throw the whole thing out.