Humiliation, harassment and triumph are part of the very public journey of a world-class athlete
“There is some doubt about the fact that this person is a lady.” It was 2009, and 18-year-old Caster Semenya had just won a gold medal in the 800m at the World Championships in Berlin. The general secretary of the International Association of Athletics Federation (now World Athletics) was addressing the media, announcing that Semenya was clearly “a woman, but maybe not 100%”.
Semenya has, to this day, not watched this press conference: “I’ve heard about it, but I don’t care to see it,” she writes in her memoir, The Race to Be Myself. Why should she? It marked the public start of a long campaign of harassment and discrimination by the IAAF that had already begun behind closed doors. In the run-up to the race, officials had subjected Semenya to two rounds of “gender tests”, in Pretoria and Berlin.
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