Sharp said: “I was at a friends house getting ready for a school disco”. Canada’s Melissa Bishop had the fastest time at 1:58:38.
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Semenya, she added, will “definitely win against us, even without using her full strength”.
The South African is a firm favourite for a gold medal.
However those rules are successfully challenged by another athlete, and the Court of Arbitration for Sport suspends the ruling until July 2017.
Thus Chand – who finished seventh in her 100m heat here, failing to qualify for last weekend’s final – and Semenya and at least one other female athlete in Rio is presumably competing without the testosterone squelching medication. These are the girls you see week in and week out. “It’s definitely changed the racing game this year”.
“It wasn’t easy. It was pretty hot”, she told the Olympic News Service after her heat. Caster Semenya was identified for sex testing because of the way she looked and the way she ran.
But she said: “The bad parts are probably that people are very quick to judge your performance”.
Following her dominance of the 2009 World Championships, the International Association for Athletics Federations (IIAF) decided it would impose a limit on the levels of testosterone a person could have in their body and be able to compete in women’s events. She was suspended for 11 months. The court’s ruling, though, is provisional, giving track’s governing body two years in which to study the science and possibly revisit the matter.
Paula Radcliffe, Great Britain’s great distance runner, says that if Semenya is in the Rio 800 “then it’s no longer sport”. “It’s not anybody’s fault”.
Sadly, the better she runs the more controversy will be generated.
“She is eligible to compete so we have to accept it at the moment”.
“Other athletes have their own natural advantages”.
South Africa’s Caster Semenya prepares to compete in a women’s 800-meter heat during the athletics competitions of the 2016 Summer Olympics at the Olympic stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2016.
Because of privacy issues, the results of Semenya’s gender test have not been made public. “There are no rules about hyperandrogenism at these Rio Games”. She advanced to the semis with a personal best 1:59.78. “My testosterone level is higher than Jackie Joyner-Kersee’s, but she would defeat me in a race for many other reasons”. She destroyed the 800-meter field at the world championships in Berlin, winning with a time of 1:55:45, more than two seconds faster than her nearest competitor in the final.
“Trying to feel my body first so I can feel comfortable”, she said. May she win like she has today. “It’s an issue of protecting human rights, but I guess the decision is who has to be protected?”
The semi-finals are set to take place on Thursday (Rio time) and South Africans can watch the race on Friday morning, followed by the finals on Sunday morning at 2.15am.
When Caster Semenya won silver at London 2012, #HandsOffCaster emerged on Twitter.
“I think at this point, what I think doesn’t really matter”.
She is an athlete with an unblemished record and has never been accused of doping and yet there continue to be grumbles as to why she hasn’t been excluded from the Olympics.
Semenya knows a bit about competing against a stacked deck. “She is not the only one in the world running as a woman in her condition”. “I don’t know. I don’t give a damn about it”.
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Increased levels of testosterone is one of more than 40 characteristics that stand outside the common binary definitions of male and female, which could indicate someone is intersex.
