I wrote a research paper on the ethics and the impact on law of the new
WADA Athlete Biological Passport for my Health Law class last week. While I am still in too much shock from the writing to do a summary, here is a fantastic read about some of the ethical issues that I came across regarding "equality and fairness in sport" and some of the gray areas surrounding it in relation to
Caster Semenya.
In short, sport is not fair, it rewards inequality and competition. So embrace the various factors that make athletic achievements stand out (I assume he only respects the natural, if not unusual, factors), even if they make us question a few of our basic paradigms, such as man v. woman.
I agree that it is a tad arbitrary to declare someone not quite a woman, not quite a man...SHE considers herself a woman, lived as a woman and was raised as a woman, just because her testosterone is above the arbitrary limit, she can no longer pursue her passion competitively? Something does not smell right here.
What makes it even more disturbing is that even the IOC/IAAF do not have a clearly delineated definition of "woman." Classifications like that are nothing but social norms cloaked as science, unfortunately for Caster Semanya, she does not fit into that norm. If their rules are to make the sport fair, well they failed to secure her fairness.
She was not trying to cheat and ended up being used and is now a tragic sporting figure, a freak! While other "freaks" are being congratulated on their achievements, she has become a bureaucratic headache and a tabloid headline. I hope that she gets her wish:
That doesn’t suck. It sucks when I was running and they were writing those things. That sucked. That is when it sucks. Now I just have to walk away. That’s all I can do.” She smiled a small, bemused smile. “Walk away from all of this, maybe forever. Now I just walk away.” Then she took a few steps backward, turned around, and did.The words below are an overview of
Ariel Levy's New Yorker article on Caster Semenya, by
Amby Burfoot over at
Runner's World.:
****** Quick comment by me: I think (hope) that he is just simplifying his point and making a dramatic/ironic statement about swimming rewarding "tall, hyper-flexible whites". He could have and should have left out the "whites" in this sentence and been just as persuasive. I think a few other factors, such as access and lack of role models have something to do with the predominance of 'whites' at the higher echelons of swimming. All the factors he references are intrinsic/physiological traits unique to individual athletes, strange that he would suddenly bring race into it.>>> The idea that sports are fair and require a "level playing field" is ludicrous. Instead, it's understood but little discussed that different sports reward different physical talents, many of which are inborn. Midgets make good jockeys and coxswains, but lousy basketball players, while Shaq on figure skates would make great comedy but horrific Olympics.
>>> Because running is a skill-free, low-cost sport, anyone in the world can compete--you don't need an expensive swimming pool, tennis court or golf course membership. This means that the full panoply of human beings can and does run. The IAAF has more member nations, 213, than the United Nations (192) or the the International Olympic Commitee (2005). And the runners from these countries will finish first or last according to their innate physiology. Sure, training makes you faster, but all top runners train roughly the same. Ultimately, training doesn't win gold medals; choosing your mother and father carefully wins the gold. East Africans win the distance golds, Jamaicans win the sprint golds, and now we have a new geo-success pattern: Women from a small corner of Mozambique/South Africa win the women's 800 meters. Do not doubt that some sports agents have already dispatched their minions to this new frontier, looking for the next Caster Semenya
>>> We have no way to legislate against these results, nor should we. Do you think Semenya is any more of a freak than Haile Gebrselassie or Usain Bolt? I don't. As far as I'm concerned, a 2:03:59 marathon is crazy freaky, and a 9.58 for 100 meters is even more irrational. These are not normMulotaEDal individuals; they were born at the 99.99th percentile of human variation. Semenya is just the latest example of the same. Should we post rules against guys who weigh less than 130 pounds or stand taller than 6' 4" because they might tilt the playing field? Ridiculous. Should we set a hormone limit that would prohibit Semenya from racing against other women? Same answer: No, and in part because we wouldn't know where to draw the line. Who can define the difference between Semenya and the muscular Maria Mutola, 2000 Olympic champ in the 800, and winner of a credibility-straining 16 straight 800s in the annual Prefontaine Classic track meet?
So now we are left with choices. You can of course give up your interest in running, and navigate over to another sport. You might try swimming, which rewards tall, hyper-flexible whites.
For me, that strategy doesn't work. Running is my sport--it has been for a long time, and I'm not willing to change at this late point. So I'll stake out a different stand, thank you. I'm going to marvel at the world's greatest runners--men and women, sprinters to marathoners--in all their infinite variation. I enjoy watching runners achieve the seemingly unattainable. It makes me realize that all of us, in our own best fields, can likewise do more than we or anyone else ever thought possible.
Posts
