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'Hell no': Caster Semenya will not take testosterone medication
'Hell no': Caster Semenya will not take testosterone medication
(This is a follow-up to this previous article: Semenya loses landmark legal case against IAAF over testosterone levels.)
I can't say I am with her after reading this TBH. I have not watched a single race to date where someone wins with such great difference.
Usain Bolt's records and times were just as impressive in his fields. Should the IAAF have forced him to lower his testosterone to even the playing field? This ruling is Harrison Bergeron levels of absurd IMO.
This is a separate issue, but I still consider it more likely than not that Usain Bolt used performance enhancing drugs. To my mind, he's Lance Armstrong all over again - here are the similarities as I see them:
That ignores the huge fact that his physical profile is very unlike every other traditional sprinter. Also, because he's the obvious outlier, he's done practically every drug test under the sun.
i'd be more surprised if he didn't, personally, because i'm pretty sure nearly every athlete in every major, high-level sport uses some form of PEDs. it only takes one person to make it so that the only way to be competitive is to use PEDs, and in any case most sports are pushing the boundaries of the human body at this point.
I just watched his 3 world record runs, 100, 200 and 4x100; in none of those is there such a huge difference. If this woman is consistently outdoing her peers with such huge gaps, that is a big problem and can hurt the sport. For what the rest of the athletes compete?
If you have to artificially level the playing field to remove natural (i.e. entirely genetic) advantages amongst the competitors to make it "fair" for the rest of the competitors, then what's the point of it being a sport in the first place? It's absurd.
VO2 max is a huge factor in most endurance sports and is entirely genetic. So should we be testing every athlete for their VO2 max and then artificially restricting their airway or oxygen uptake with drugs to even the playing field?
You've just argued against the existence of women's only competitions AT ALL.
Only if you take what I said in to the most extremely literal way possible, sure. But if we are going to start artificially restricting female competitors natural testosterone levels, then maybe we should do away with sex based divisions and instead go with ones based on other competitive measures, like testosterone levels. But as it stands now, where there is that divide, to force a female competitor to artificially lower their natural testosterone levels just so others in the same field can compete is absurd and IMO incredibly morally/ethically questionable.
Or times? E.g. for a 100m race those do 10secs on average form one group, and so on for 11s, 12s, etc. Tho IDK the averages and average sex-based differences, so that might be silly.
I'd like to see a study of how would it be if athletics were promiscuous.
It is not absurd. See, in order for one to be a competitor, there needs to be competition. If a boxer 170cm tall that weighs 58kg fights one that is 2m tall and 100kg, chances are the latter will crush the former. And that is why there are many divisions in fighting sports. In a sport like running, the physical advantage is the defining factor, so leveling the playground is necessary. But in a sport like soccer it is not: it is not about physical superiority for the most part.
I know this is an aside in an otherwise complicated issue, but the VO2-max issue is generally resolved the other way around:
Sure, exercise can lead to asthma, especially in cold environments, but it's pretty silly that you're more likely to do well in the Winter Olympics if you have asthma than if you don't.
In swimming and all sorts of other endurance competitions, huge percentages of the top competitors have asthma. It felt like cheating the first time I was at an international swimming competition and saw all the inhaler use right before competition (within the doping limits) that lead the competitors to go from normal people to literally shaking due to the strong effects of their medication.
So do you ban asthma medication, and consequently have a lot of athletes injure themselves away from being able to compete because they get exercised induced asthma during their careers?
Or do you require everyone else to drug up?
For testosterone levels things are way more complicated of course, but the general idea: you can be genetically favored for a sport, be that height, arm span, muscular growth, reaction time, hand-eye-coordination, an immune system that can handle huge amounts of exercise without you always getting sick.
Is Caster Semenya just genetically disadvantaged to the degree that she can't compete in running events, just like I'm just not tall enough to be a high jumper? I don't know. In a situation with no obviously good solutions, is disallowing her from competing the least bad one? I don't know.
There are exceptions for athletes that can show higher-than-allowed hemoglobin levels that would otherwise be disallowed for blood doping because they can document genetics for being like that all their lives. Is a similar exception for testosterone levels for women in order? I don't know. It very well could be.
I guess the question is whether this woman just happens to be in the five-nines percentile for normal variation or if her heightened testosterone levels are due to some discrete, specific congenital abnormality? Kinda like how we accept that professional swimmers have considerable longer limbs than average, but if someone with a third leg (to chose a really stupid example) were to compete that might be deemed unfair?
It's a really tricky issue with no good solution. On the one hand, it's horribly demeaning to force people into taking medication to suppress their natural hormone levels. On the other hand, without it, biologically 'normal' women are effectively unable to compete.
Let's define biologically normal.
Because I would argue most of the people who participate in the Olympics are by no means biologically normal. They've been born with a certain set of attributes that enhances their physical performance and increases the top level that they're able to achieve. The idea that we have to define certain people as being biologically 'abnormal' at the top end in order to artificially reduce their performance is absolutely absurd.
I agree here - it would be weird and terribly difficult to pick some set of normal hormonal levels and enforce those as a standard. If people naturally produced less, should they be able to take supplements to even it out?
As a comparison, wasn’t Michael Phelps found to naturally produced less lactic acid than the normal person? That’s a biological advantage, but he wasn’t disqualified for it. I just find this whole thing very weird.
yes. he produces literally like, half the lactic acid of an ordinary person.