South African 800m Olympic champion, Caster Semenya and her legal team celebrated a Swiss court’s ruling that allows her to continue competing without taking testosterone-lowering drugs while she continues her appeals.
Last month, an arbitrator agreed with the IAAF, meaning that Semenya would need to take medications to lower her testosterone levels. Semenya appealed, resulting in the Swiss supreme court suspending the rule.
The suspension of the Court of Arbitration in Sports (CAS) ruling is very temporary —it only lasts until June 25, 2019. Furthermore, this three-week grace period only applies to Semenya. Any other women with naturally-occurring levels of testosterone above five nanamoles per liter (nmol/L) are still required to undergo medical treatment to artificially suppress their testosterone levels if they want to compete in IAAF events from 400 meters to a mile.
Semenya has been battling the IAAF for the right to run in the body she was born in for 10 years now, ever since she first burst onto the scene at the 2009 World Championships. In May, the CAS upheld the ability of the IAAF to target athletes with disorders of sex development (DSD). People with DSD — a condition which is commonly referred to as intersex — might have hormones, genes, or reproductive organs that develop outside the gender binary.
The CAS agreed with Semenya that the IAAF regulations were discriminatory. However, the majority of the people serving on that panel endorsed the decision anyway.
For now, the IAAF will have until June 25 to fight this temporary suspension. If it does not get the suspension overturned, or misses the deadline, Semenya will be able to continue to compete in her best events in the body she was born in until there is a ruling on her appeal — a process that could take a year or more, depending on the SFT’s actions.
But this narrow ruling will have consequences in the meantime, as all other women with DSDs will have to either take medication, undergo invasive surgery, or abandon events between 400 meters and one mile if they want to continue to compete against women in elite competitions. If the temporary suspension is overturned on June 25, Semenya has stated that she will not take medication or suppress her testosterone levels in any way; she plans to compete in events longer than one mile, such as the 2,000 meters.
Semenya is scheduled to compete in one event in the next three weeks, the Meeting de Montreuil outside of Paris, France, on June 11.
