Breaking: South Africa’s Semenya loses landmark testosterone case against IAAF

Caster Semenya has lost her landmark case against rules regulating testosterone in female athletes. 

Semenya, a double Olympic champion who has dominated 800m running in the last decade, fought regulations imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) which aimed to compel ‘hyperandrogenic’ athletes — or those with ‘differences of sexual development’ (DSD) — to lower their testosterone levels if they wished to compete as women. 

The IAAF argued that the rules were essential to preserve a level playing field to ensure all female athletes can see ‘a path to success’.

But Semenya’s cause has earned widespread support, including from a global coalition of nations and scientific experts who argue that testosterone is an arbitrary and unfair measure for determining gender.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, heard a week of arguments in the case in February. 

Victory for the IAAF has rendered a revolutionary, and for many unpalatable, change unnecessary.

To continue competing as a woman in any running event between the 400m and the mile, female athletes such as Semenya must now take testosterone suppressants like the contraceptive pill to stay under the permitted level.

Central to the IAAF’s case, Sportsmail understands, was the blood data of DSD athletes when they have competed with and without testosterone suppressants.

In 2015 the IAAF were forced to abandon their ruling on hyperandrogenism because CAS concluded there was a lack of evidence to prove testosterone increased female athletic performance and was therefore unjustifiably discriminatory.

But on this occasion the IAAF have used data from the athletes who competed while taking suppressants when the rule was in place, in a bid to prove levels of testosterone almost on a par with men do provide a significant advantage over women with normal female levels of the hormone.


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