The Caster Semenya case began acrimoniously and ended the same way.
It started with a search for a simple truth yet even in its resolution leaves loose threads and unanswered questions. The final verdict protects the rights of many sportspeople, and leaves other heroes ostracised and exposed.
Throughout it has been a mess of contradictions and conflation. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) has rejected Semenya’s appeal against athletics’ governing body’s regulations but revealed in its verdict the flaws that may ensure this is a new front rather than the end.
Nobody has truly won. One side has just lost less than the other.
For South African Semenya, Olympic champion over 800m, a private life lived publicly has now brought both an unwanted notoriety and what appears the cruellest of choices: undertake radical hormone therapy, or step away from the sport that has defined her life and taken her from rural
poverty to the status of national icon.
The IAAF has its case but not its vindication.
It took three arbitrators more than two months to reach their decision. When they did, only two of them accepted the argument and the policy that came from it: that high testosterone in female athletes confers significant advantages in size, strength and power from puberty onwards, that
the rules were “necessary, reasonable and proportionate” to ensure fair competition in women’s sport.
Semenya is an easy woman to defend, an inadvertent global cause celebre that few cannot find immense sympathy for.
She is not the only female athlete with differences in sexual development (DSD) in her event, let alone her sport. When she brought her case to Cas, claiming discrimination, her statement was defiant: “I am Mokgadi Caster Semenya. I am a woman and I am fast.”
Multiple Wimbledon champion Martina Navratilova summed up the most potent argument in Semenya’s favour when she pointed out that the athlete had done nothing wrong.
She hasn’t. Semenya was born with her condition, raised as a woman and continues to identify as a woman. Her high levels of testosterone are naturally occurring. She was beaten at the 2012 London Olympics only by a Russian who has now been banned for doping.
Now, if she wishes to compete at September’s World Championships in Doha, she will have to take a blood test for her eligibility and then start taking medication within one week.
You would wish that on no-one. Sport is about elite excellence but also about inclusivity. It is about being as good as you can biologically be, about bringing together different nations, creeds and physiques.
