All women competing in Olympic track and field events will now be required to confirm their gender via a cheek swab or dry blood DNA test.
Sebastian Coe, who heads up World Athletics, the governing body of track, was clear-headed and resolute in announcing the new policy.
“We’re not just talking about the integrity of female women’s sport, but actually guaranteeing it,” Coe said. “And this, we feel, is a really important way of providing confidence and maintaining that absolute focus on the integrity of competition.”
Inexplicably, the International Olympic Committee has elected to leave this issue up to each sport’s international federation.
It’s this leadership vacuum that not only threatens the integrity of individual sports but also jeopardizes the health and safety of the athletes themselves.
Readers will remember Imane Khelif, the Algerian male Olympic boxer who competed against women. Khelif was awarded a gold medal, despite having been disqualified by the International Boxing Association a few years earlier after tests revealed Imane with an XY chromosome.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) went along with Khelif’s charade and allowed the boxer to punch away on female athletes.
Track and Field has been navigating this gender controversy since 2009 when Caster Semenya, a South African athlete with naturally high testosterone levels, first won a gold medal in 800 meters at the World Championships.
Semenya has a condition called 5a-Reductase 2 deficiency, the same condition Khelif reportedly has been diagnosed with. Now 34 years of age, the track and field star was ordered in 2019 to suppress testosterone levels – but refused.
As the Daily Citizen’s Emily Washburn has previously reported:
But at the heart of the new track policy isn’t really the exceptions and the outliers but rather those male athletes who seem determined to game the system and by doing so, achieve a competitive advantage.
Be aware that you’ll be reading in the coming days and weeks that World Athletics is banning “transwomen athletes” – but such a claim isn’t true. That’s because there’s no such thing as a “transwoman” – there are just two genders, male and female. Just because a man is pretending to be a woman doesn’t make it so.
Human Rights Watch and other critics have described DNA testing rules of female athletes as abusive, harmful, discriminatory and accusatory.
It’s true that male athletes are not similarly tested, but women masquerading as men provides no competitive advantage. And complaining that such testing portrays women as “cheats” belies the reality of other similar checks such as screenings for performance enhancing drugs.
Trust but verify.
It’s been 125 years since women first appeared in the 1900 Olympics in Paris. There were just 22 of them out of a total of 997 athletes. These commonsense policies being implemented in Track and Field will ensure that the distinctiveness of female competition will be maintained and protected in the upcoming Summer Olympic games in Los Angeles in 2028.
This is a good thing, and every other Olympic sport should race to follow suit.
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