I’m going to wade into the controversy surrounding South African 800 meter runner and newly crowned world champion Caster Semenya. By now the story has made the rounds globally, with its equal parts prurience and controversy and politicization causing both track & field and Africa to draw attention in circles that ordinarily pay little attention to either. You’ve probably heard the story: Semenya came out of nowhere to win the World title, immediately people starting asking pointed questions about her gender because of her supposedly androgynous look, and voila, an international sporting scandal emerges, complete with charges of racism, questions about gender and sexuality, and conversations both scientific and pseudoscientific.
South Africans are outraged and compensate with a heroine’s welcome for Semenya as prominent supporters rally around her. Some in the United Nations are outraged. The New York Times does not help with some questionable language usage (scroll down to “questionable language in the NYT) that leaves some academics, you guessed it, outraged.
It seems to me that there are two separate questions that should be addressed here. There is the one that is drawing so much attention, the gender issue, which ties into questions of race. And then there are the realities of the possibility of whether Semenya used performance enhancing drugs.
On the first of these questions the critics have the most traction. A number of observers have invoked the image of Saartjie Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus” whose supposedly exotic sexuality was paraded throughout Britain, leaving Baartman to suffer as a freak show for English voyeurs. Although we want to be wary with historical analogies, this is the tenor of the current debate, and the discussion too often has placed undue emphasis on Semenya’s gender and sexuality largely because of how she looks. On this issue the critics are largely right and their concerns fit into a much larger historical, social, political, and cultural context.
There is another component, however. The reality is that in the hyper-competitive world of track and field, Semenya came out of nowhere to dominate a field of the world’s best women’s 800 meter runners. And so we would be remiss, given the realities of rampant PED usage across sports, not to ask the question — a question that is not asked not only of outlier performances such as this one, but of nearly any world class athlete. this is the world we inhabit, and it is the world Semenya entered when she became an elite athlete. It is possible that Semenya’s performance is legitimate, in which case many of us who love the sport are thrilled to be able to see her help transform her event much as we are with Usain Bolt’s dominance in the sprints. But world class athletes rarely come from nowhere. And so the best that Semenya can do would be to continue to run and to pass all of her drug tests. She is not the first woman to have a whispering campaign start about her gender — in large part because men have cheated the system by trying to pass as women — and she will not be the last. And keep in mind also that many of her most vocal skeptics will come from within the realm of world-class middle distance running, where her competitors will be asking the same questions. And her competitors are women from all over the world, including from Africa. There is certainly a gender issue at stake here as there may well be a racial aspect. But let us not pretend that asking about PED’s when an outlier performance such as Semenya’s happen is in and of itself in any way either racist or sexist given the nature of contemporary sport.