South Africa’s Caster Semenya, a two-time Olympic 800m champion, said on Sunday that the IOC’s reinstatement of gender verification tests for the 2028 Los Angeles Games was “disrespectful to women”.
The former hyperandrogenic athlete also expressed his disappointment that the move was taken under the leadership of the new IOC president, Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe.
“For me personally, for her being a woman from Africa, knowing how African women or women in the Southern Hemisphere are affected by that, of course, it causes harm,” Semenya said during a press conference in Cape Town on the sidelines of the sports competition.
The IOC had previously used chromosomal sex testing between 1968 and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, before abandoning it in 1999 under pressure from the scientific community, which questioned its effectiveness, and from its athletes’ commission.
“It came as a failure. And that’s why it was discarded,” Semenya said in Cape Town.
