3 African athletes who became victims of gender eligibility rules, including a Kenyan

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is in the spotlight following his controversial win at Paris Olympics but who are the other African athletes that fell victim to gender eligibility rules?

Debate is still aging following the controversial fight involving Italian female boxer Angela Carini and Algerian Imane Khelif.

Carini quit just 46 seconds into her round-of-16 bout with Khelif on Thursday after the Algerian landed one significant punch.

Last year, Khelif was disqualified from the women’s World Championships in New Delhi for failing a gender eligibility test. At the same tournament, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting was also disqualified for failing to meet the gender eligibility criteria of the International Boxing Association (IBA).

The IBA did not specify why the boxers failed their gender eligibility tests but did clarify that neither underwent testosterone examinations. Neither Khelif, 25, nor two-time world champion Lin, 28, identifies as transgender or intersex.

The controversy has brought to the fore the debate over athletes who have elevated levels of testosterone competing against other women, which necessitated a rule change in athletics.

Pulse Sports highlights three African athletes who became victims of the gender debate and rule changes that have since slowed down their athletics careers.

Caster Semenya

Thrust in the spotlight since 2009, the South African runner has been the subject of gender debate ever since she won gold in 800m at the World Championships in Berlin 15 years ago.

What followed was a litany of court cases and rule changes that eventually barred her and other athletes like her from competing.

International Association of Athletics Federations (now World Athletics) in 2019 came up with a rule that requires women with high levels of testosterone to take medication to suppress it.

The rules took effect after two-time Olympic 800m champion Semenya lost a legal challenge against them.

The IAAF maintained that the rules were necessary for fair competition, arguing that athletes with high levels of testosterone benefit from increased bone and muscle strength similar to men who have gone through puberty.

The rules apply to distances from 400m to a mile, and includes the heptathlon, which concludes with an 800m race.

For Semenya, the option now is to either take suppressants or compete in distances such as 5,000m or longer but she has since not agreed to either.

Margaret Nyairera

Like Semenya, former Olympics 800m bronze medallist Margaret Nyairera of Kenya was also hit by the new rules.

Since then, she has not been able to compete, saying simply switching to another distance like 5,000m was not possible, with different skills and training needed that would take years to reach elite level.

“I am not going to take medication because I am not sick and … those are chemicals you are putting in your body, you don’t know how it will affect you later,” she tokd CGTN in a past interview.

Nyairera feels the idea of having different categories of runners — comparing it to boxing, where heavyweights don’t fight flyweights — might be “a good idea to make it fair.”

That is yet to happen and she has been in the cold since.

Francine Niyonsaba

Burundian runner Francine Niyonsaba, who won silver in 800m at the 2016 Rio Olympics, has an intersex condition which also saw her fall foul of the rules.

Niyonsaba is one of the athletes banned by World Athletics from competing in women’s races from 400m to one mile in distance because of what they consider to be her body’s elevated levels of naturally occurring testosterone.

Unlike the other two, the Burundian switched to longer distances and even broke a new 2,000m record at a Continental Tour Gold meeting in Zagreb, Croatia, last year, breaking the previous record by more than two seconds.

Niyonsaba has hyperandrogenism, a condition characterised by the natural production of more testosterone than women without the condition.