Caster Semenya ending 7 year fight against sex eligibility rules.

[GargoylesofBeelzebub]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-15157343/Olympic-champion-runner-Semenya-ends-landmark-legal-fight-against-sex-eligibility-rules.html

Finally. The new SRY testing requirements have put an end to this.

Good.

Hurrah. Now give back your medals and prize money.

Great, only female athletes should compete in female categories.

Good.

The article still implying Semenya has never thought of themselves or been thought of by others as anything other than a girl or woman, when it's plainly evident he thinks of himself as a man, and so do his wife and children.

I'd have a lot more sympathy for him without the intentional and cynical deception for personal advantage of a man, with the aim to use women for gain. If he had to compete as a man he would simply do what most of the rest of the world do, and what he appears now to be doing - to accept that he just has a body that is not in the league of athletes that makes Olympic level competition possible.

Remember that Semenya has a sports science degree. He has known exactly what he was doing for a long time.

She has the typical male XY chromosome pattern but also female physical traits and high levels of naturally occurring testosterone. DSD conditions are sometimes called intersex conditions.

Even the DM is too squeamish to say, that CS is an otherwise physiologically normal man, who has been through male puberty, but was mis-assigned female at birth because of having undescended testicles and a micropenis. These are not female traits.

Why does the article refer to “women with DSDs” when Caster is a man with a DSD?

I look forward to Khelif’s case and those of whoever else decides to go to the CAS.

I look forward to the evidence being presented to defend their claims.

About time.

to accept that he just has a body that is not in the league of athletes that makes Olympic level competition possible.

It’s worse than that. His 800m PB is 1:54.25. I just looked up the county school boys record for the county I grew up in and it’s 1:52.10.

At his peak, he wasn’t even good enough to break a county school boy record. That’s county, not even national. The under 17s national record is 1:49.21. In the boys’/men’s competition he would have struggled to be noted at county level. He’s just like thousands of men/boys who can run around 2 minutes for the 800m which means nothing competitively past the age of 15.

Interestingly he doesn’t hold any South African girls’ records even though he ran quicker than the girls’ U19s record when he was 17-18, so not sure why.

Worth a complaint to the paper on the grounds of inaccuracy.

We know from the CAS that Semenya:s DSD is XY 5-ARD (5-alpha-reductase deficiency), which only affects males.

He is male.

@NotBadConsidering I believe Semenya had a bit of a reputation for being a lazy trainer, didn't put the work in. Of course this could have been to conceal Semenya's male advantage. How complicit Semenya has been all the way through would be an important question.

I do have some sympathy for athletes with DSDs along with athletes who get caught drug taking. So much of this IMO is driven by coaches/trainers looking to further their own careers. They are not remotely interested in the long term harm, physical and mental, done to the athletes.

My sympathy does not extend to allowing them to compete either in the wrong sex category or on performance enhancing drugs. But I do have sympathy for young, naive athletes who get told to comply with their coaching team or risk losing their athletic careers.

Yes, and I wonder if 18 is old enough for him to have fully understood what he was getting himself into at 2009 world champs.

But that was a very long time ago. He has spent many years pursuing this, long past when he had the education to know better and the resources to allow him plenty of other choices, and he's only giving up now because he has to.

"She was identified as female at birth"

what happened to assigned?

Would it be very cynical of me to suggest he's finally calling it a day because his male advantage has now been greatly reduced due to his age? There's no point carrying on the charade if you're not winning / making money!

So a below-average man only achieved and won by wrongly competing in the women's categories.

Goodness, that is something to be proud of, isn't it?

Good riddance to a mediocre cheating male athlete.

I hope he starts to reflect on his cheating behaviour as his two little girls grow up and get into competitive sports themself.

That and him having no chance of winning the case. But yeah, he's no spring chicken.

I didn't know that. It's all very well being told you're a girl when you're a child, but when you've been through an education and are an adult it must be pretty obvious to him that he isn't

I think for young athletes, defying their coaching team is very difficult.

Later on it becomes about the money. Say anything and the gravy train stops. It isn't simply the loss of money but also the prestige.

Some athletes start to see this as their right, that cheating is acceptable if it gives them what they want.

Lost any sympathy with Caster the second he told Lynsey Sharp, whom he cheated out of an Olympic medal, to bite her tongue and train harder. At that moment it became very clear what kind of man he was.

This is good news, and I hope the spotlight will now be on other biological males who try to cheat in female sports.

I remember him doing this, but I looked the other day and I couldn't find where he did it. For me, him doing that showed me many things more clearly about him. Particularly because he has that degree in sports science.

He always knew. It's been posted many times before but this is presumably one of his favourite photos of his young self, given that it was chosen for inclusion in his autobiography. On what planet would a fifteen year old girl dress like this on a school trip? The only sensible interpretation of it has to be that he was by his mid teens accepted as what he is, a boy/man with a DSD, with the 'I'm a girl' thing coming later, once its implications for a possible sporting career became clear.