For the first time in a long time, champion runner Caster Semenya heads into the athletics world championships with virtually no chance to win.
On Thursday morning (AEST), the 31-year-old three-time world champion at 800 metres will run instead in the 5,000m race.
She is not considered a serious medal contender and it is the first time since she started dominating her favourite distance, well over a decade ago, that anybody has said that.
The South African chose to run in a race she does not prefer because she declined to submit to rules in track and field that demand she take hormone-reducing treatments if she wants to enter the 800m.
They are rules that Semenya, in a statement through her lawyer, called "an affront to the spirit of the sport".
Semenya was assigned female at birth, was raised as a girl and identifies as a woman.
She has an intersex condition called 46,XY differences in sex development that causes male and female traits and a testosterone level higher than the typical female range. She was banned from her best event after losing her appeal of a World Athletics regulation that made women with her condition ineligible for some races.
She is not transgender but her case, and those involving others who have similar intersex conditions, carry strong implications for how transgender athletes are treated and classified.
Semenya's situation, and the similar plight of 200m Olympic silver medallist Christine Mboma, are the most relevant illustrations of how complex the sport's rules are regarding the participation of women who have high natural testosterone and what some say is an unfair athletic advantage over other women.
For instance, the rules, which will be revisited soon, bar Semenya and others from running distances between 400m and 1,500m unless they suppress their testosterone.
Mboma is injured and did not travel to the championships.
Semenya was not expected to attend either, but her name was a surprise inclusion on the start list for the longer race.
The related but separate issue of transgender women in sport again burst into the spotlight last month when international leaders in swimming banned transgender women from elite competitions if they had not started medical treatment to suppress testosterone production before either the onset of puberty or age 12, whichever comes later.
World Athletics president Sebastian Coe quickly showed his support for swimming's move and said track's governing body would review its rules by the end of the year, likely with a view to making them stricter.
"The balance between inclusivity and fairness will always, in my view, fall now on the side of fairness," Coe said.
Such a recalibration of the rules would likely only hurt, not help, Semenya's cause.
In a rare interview she gave on HBO's Real Sports earlier this year, she said she once told track officials: "It's fine. I'm a female, I don't care. If you want to see I'm a woman, I will show you my vagina. All right?'."
Critics of World Athletics say its recent trend of essentially lumping together the transgender and intersex issues is a problem.
Coe has often used the phrase "biology trumps identity" as a catch-all defence for restrictions in both, breezing over the nuance.
Track's two rule sets do have crossover in that both, broadly, require athletes to reduce their natural testosterone to compete.
While the DSD (differences of sexual development) regulations, in place since 2019, have a real-life impact on athletes and careers, transgender regulations do not at this point because there are no transgender women in top-level track and field. Neither are there in swimming.
Roger Pielke Jr, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a sports governance expert, said the leaders of those two key Olympic sports are in "a moral panic" over transgender athletes that are not there.
"As if there's not bigger issues sport could deal with."
Swimming's sweeping ban set a bad precedent, said Joanna Harper, a transgender woman and adviser to World Athletics on its transgender and DSD policies.
She supports some regulations but FINA, swimming's international governing federation, left no room for compromise.
"Did they set the world stirring? You bet they did," Harper said.
"But I don't think it was necessary and I don't think it was justified."
AP
