South Africa’s Caster Semenya, the 800m Olympic and world champion, is seeking to overturn the eligibility rules for middle distance female runners with high testosterone levels at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland. The South African government is set to spend about R25-million in the court battle against the IAAF, where it will be defending the Olympic champion.

The new International Association of Athletics (IAAF) regulation states that in order to continue competing, female athletes with high testosterone levels who race in distances from 400m to 1,000m must use medication to have their testosterone level lowered.

The IAAF wants female athletes such as South Africa’s Caster Semenya and India’s Dutee Chand, who have naturally elevated testosterone levels, to be obliged to take suppressants that lower their levels before being allowed to compete.

This is because the IAAF believes that female athletes with hyperandrogenism gain an unfair advantage over other women because of their higher levels of naturally occurring testosterone.

Hyperandrogenism refers to androgen excess, a medical condition characterised by excessive levels of androgens (male sex hormones such as testosterone) in the female body and the associated effects of the elevated androgen levels.

In this regard, the IAAF positions itself as a body that needs to regulate sport to ensure that there is a level playing field among athletes.

What is peculiar about the IAAF’s new regulation is that it seeks to put limitations on natural talent. I mean, for example, there are students in institutions of learning — whether it be at primary, secondary or tertiary level — that have higher IQ levels than the average student, which means that these students have a natural competitive advantage.

In following the IAAF’s logic, should there be measures in place that will seek to decrease these students’ IQ levels for them to compete more fairly with other students in terms of their academic performance?

University of Alberta researcher Marty Mrazik says being “bright” may be due to an excess level of a natural hormone. Mrazik and a colleague have published a paper in Roeper Review linking giftedness (having an IQ score of 130 or higher) to “prenatal exposure to higher levels of testosterone”.

Mrazik hypothesises that “in the same way that physical and cognitive deficiencies may develop in utero, so too could similar exposure to this naturally occurring chemical result in this ‘giftedness’ or natural talent, so to speak”.

“There seems to be some evidence that excessive prenatal exposure to testosterone facilitates increased connections in the brain, especially in the right prefrontal cortex,” says Mrazik, whose notion comes from his observations made during a clinical assessment of gifted individuals/ naturally talented people (Rick Nauert, 2018).

The need to regulate people’s natural competitive advantages and individual brilliance is, in fact, a direct violation of one’s basic human rights. It takes away the beauty of natural selection and seeks to overrule the laws of natural talent in favour of a “more regulated and equal playing field”.

Essentially, using the IAAF’s logic, we need to tell naturally talented people such as actor Denzel Washington, former United States President Barack Obama, media executive Oprah Winfrey, and basketball star Lebron James, to all tone it down a bit simply because their naturally possessed gifts and talents set them apart from the rest and give them an “unfair advantage”.

Simply put, the imposition of the IAAF robs those with natural talents of competing free from discrimination and is tantamount to the regulation and controlling of the bodies of naturally gifted people.

What is also important to keep sight of is that Semenya is a brand; there are numerous brands that possess competitive advantages. For example, look at Discovery in the health and insurance space and its dominance there, look at Curro’s dominance in the education space, look at Coca-Cola in the beverage and soft drinks industry, take McDonald’s in the fast food space and how dominant they are there.

Using the IAAF’s logic once again, should competition commissions across the globe be imposing some sort of regulation in order to establish a more level playing field?

Sport is an alternative vehicle in which society needs to invest vast amounts of time, energy and money in order to give effect to alternative ways of “work” outside conventional streams of employment, which typically involve obtaining a university degree and being a working professional until retirement.

Such methods are becoming outdated due to systematic and structural constraints. Such as the fact that tertiary institutions don’t have the capacity to carry all six hundred thousand students that have passed matric in 2018, coupled with the fact that the economy is unable to produce enough jobs to accommodate the number of qualified young people pouring out of the universities.

As such, we need to be aware of and promote the importance of sport and cultural development and recognise the transformative role they can play in society.

A big part of this involves harnessing, and not restricting, natural talent. DM