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The sorry saga of Caster Semenya has resurfaced, with the athlete turning up in Stellenbosch earlier this week, at the final track meeting of the Yellow Pages series, and lobbying to compete. Athletics South Africa (ASA) officials, quoting IAAF backing refused her plea.
Should anyone not know of the Semenya case, briefly, the young South African, a middling junior runner 18 months ago, effected the sort of transformation that Clark Kent undergoes after swishing through a phone booth, and she won the world 800 metres title at a canter last summer.
Her masculine appearance gave rise to suspicions of a intersex condition, where a female benefits inordinately from a surfeit of male hormones, but is in danger of serious medical complications. So there was more than one reason to get to the bottom of the case. Which the IAAF has been taking too long in doing, since she is suspended from competition in the meantime.
The fact that Semenya’s potential gate-crash in Stellenbosch was advertised well in advance suggests it was a publicity stunt – and given IAAF delays/silence, I don’t blame her. But I also hear that she is the subject of a BBC TV documentary, and the crew was part of the gate-crash plan, in order to get some good footage.
As (Dr) Ross Tucker of the invaluable Science of Sport website wrote to me this week, ‘The timing is a little strange – our national champs were held a few weeks ago, you’d have thought that would be the major target for her comeback’.
The crew, incidentally, was refused access to film in the stadium – they hadn’t applied for permission (one time you just have to applaud athletics officials’ intransigeance)!
The parallels with the Zola Budd farrago of over 25 years ago are legion, the only difference being that Budd was a white waif backed by segregationists (both in SA and the UK), whereas Semenya is a burly black championed by political opportunists.
But for the lying braggart Leonard Chuene, the then ASA president, who insisted that Semenya go to Berlin last summer, when he knew that prior medical tests on the athlete suggested she stay at home, the Semenya case could have been handled discreetly.
Which is to say, her potentially disputed gender/condition could have been treated privately, with all the advantages that that implies; principally, that a young, confused and vulnerable woman would not have become the poster girl for a bunch of discredited administrators, who were all too ready to play the race-card, to further their own political ends.
As I underlined in previous posts on this subject, I am no apologist for the IAAF, apart from the lengthy delay in resolving this issue. Because, it would appear that the IAAF, in concert with national federations has resolved similar situations to that of Semenya, without the disgraceful (and surely hurtful to Semenya) ballyhoo which has attended this case.
The only good thing to come out of this has been the removal of Chuene and his cohorts. Because if this was an example of their administrative competence, it is no wonder that athletics in SA is in such dire straits.
In an email exchange recently with Richard Mayer, athletics author and founder of the Lydiard Athletics Club in/near Johannesburg, I asked him, ‘how come with all the advantages that SA has over countries like Kenya and Ethiopia, that you don’t have the same success?’
I was thinking principally of cross country and marathon running, since huge sections of the SA population live at altitude too. And the country which gained majority rule in the early 1990s, had had such early success, particularly in men’s marathoning, with dozens of great runners, and major winners, like David Tsebe (Berlin ‘92), Willie Mtolo (New York ‘92), Mark Plajtes (’93 world champ, running for US), Josiah Thugwane (Olympics ‘96), along with Elena Meyer at all long distances. Since then, apart from the irrepressible Hendrick Ramaala, not a lot!
Richard replied at length, and has also sent me his book, Three Men Named Matthews: Memories of the Golden Age of South African Distance Running and its Aftermath.
It took a while to read the title, and when I’ve read the book, I’ll return to this subject. But given that we can expect the IAAF decision on Semenya by June (still too long a wait), I’ll leave you with Mayer’s initial succinct summation of the former SA administration, and how it affected athletics in South Africa.
‘Semenya was just the tip of the iceberg, but it displayed the corrupt, incompetent, arrogance of ASA emphatically to the SA public. With our mixture of third world talent and athletics hunger and first world infra-structure we should be one of the world’s leading athletics nations’
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