Olympic leaders say there’s no such thing as male advantage in sport. Here’s a simple question for them: if that were true, why not just scrap sex-based categories of men and women altogether? We all know why. Men run faster, jump higher and are stronger than women.
If you take the top 15-year-old boys in just the United States in a wide range of swimming and track and field events and overlay the best eight results over the top eight outstanding women in Olympic finals in 2016, only a handful of women make a final and none gets a medal of any colour. Because they’re boys, they have male hormones and developmental pathways that girls never have unless cheating is at play.
Which takes us to another huge chunk of evidence the IOC has been ignoring. I swam at a time of East German doping and in my sport the GDR women were systematically doped with testosterone from around the time of puberty. Scientists worked out in the 1960s that if they gave girls a touch of what boys got, they were guaranteed gold and most of the other prizes too.
Olympic, World and European sports results of the 1970s and 1980s were awash with injustice and the crime was confessed to as early as 1990. Yet the IOC has done nothing to address the biggest heist in sport. East German athletes have received compensation in Germany for the harm caused to them, but there has been no justice for all the women from other countries denied their rightful rewards.
This was the same organisation that had placed the heads of GDR doping on their advisory panels and had failed to act when it discovered that this doping had been run from an IOC-accredited laboratory. It was the same organisation that had ignored our pleas for justice for more than 30 years.
Ten British rowing women’s masters records are now in the hands of male athletes identifying as women. That’s not merely unfair – it’s cheating by another name. Women’s sport is not a colony for mediocre males.