Court Allows Caster Semenya to Run without Taking Testosterone-Reducing Drugs
South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya will be able to compete in her preferred 800m race without taking testosterone-reducing medication.
This comes after the double Olympic Champion moved to the Swiss Federal Tribunal to appeal April's ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which allowed the IAAF to implement new regulations that force female athletes with differences in sexual development (DSDs) to lower their levels of testosterone by taking drugs.
“The Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland has ordered the IAAF to immediately suspend the implementation of the eligibility regulations against Caster Semenya, allowing her to compete without restriction in the female category while her appeal is pending,” Semenya’s lawyers said in a statement.
“The Swiss Supreme Court has granted welcome temporary protection to Caster Semenya. This is an important case that will have fundamental implications for the human rights of female athletes,” added Dorothee Schramm, Swiss counsel for Semenya.
Semenya said she remains hopeful that her appeal at the Swiss court will be successful.
“I am thankful to the Swiss judges for this decision. I hope that following my appeal I will once again be able to run free,” she said.
The suspension gives Semenya an opportunity to compete in the 800m event in Oslo on June 13th.
The 28-year-old is set to complete in a 2,000 meters event in Paris on June 11th and had indicated she would run in the 3,000 meters at the Diamond League’s Prefontaine Classic in California on June 30th.
The new IAAF rules require female athletes with high natural levels of testosterone wishing to participate in events from 400m to a mile to medically lower that level to under 5 nmol/L.
Comments (3)
Semenya congratulations on your win. I hope you will go on to obliterate all the records that have been previously set. No doubt the previous ruling was going to be the beginning of bias against women and more particularly black women.
I don't like the look of this guy! He takes advantage of the poor girls & knows he'll keep on sucking them dry in competitions as long as he continues faking his gender! Why don't they just cut out anything that's not feminine in him? Caster dik dik!
Hehehe... So the Court has ignored the one true sign of masculinity... That his wife is pregnant! What more do they need? DNA that he fathered the child? In the end, I think that the question of Gender will be determined in one of two ways. First hormones in the body, or specifically, the presence of the organs that produce the hormones that make one a man, or woman. Testicles in a Man, Ovaries in a Woman. Or Secondly, Scientists say that men and women's brains are differently 'wired up'. A woman's brain is 'one' while a man's brain is 'compartmentalized'. Hormones are produced by specific organs, while science has identified specific differences in the Male and Female brain. It will eventually come to one, or both.