The IOC has said the results of the tests Khelif and Lin previously took are unreliable. Even so, its seems Bach, sadly, is too in thrall to gender ideology to notice. But Sebastian Coe, already on early manoeuvres to succeed the German as president, is different. As leader of World Athletics, he has made it his priority to defend the integrity of the women’s category. He knew he could not risk a repeat of Rio 2016, where three runners with differences in sexual development (DSD) knocked biological females off the podium in the women’s 800 metres. As such he decided last year to establish a policy where DSD athletes could only enter women’s events if they had substantially reduced their testosterone.
The policy is not perfect, given the myriad studies illustrating that testosterone suppression can never truly eliminate male advantage. But it is leagues better than anything the IOC has created through its genuflection to lobbyists who believe that all you need to be a woman is to show an ‘F’ on your passport. Coe, at the very least, conveys the impression that he cares about women having a level playing field. “I have daughters, how do you think I feel about this?” he said during these Olympics, describing the binfire engulfing boxing. If you did not delineate the clearest boundaries between male and female competition, “no woman” he argued, “would ever win a sporting event again”.
He gave a similarly robust reply when I asked him here if he regarded the boxing maelstrom as a failure of IOC leadership. “You have to have a clear policy,” Coe said. “If you don’t, you get into difficult territory. And I think that’s what we’ve witnessed here. This isn’t just a ‘nice to have’. You have to put a flagpole in the ground. You’re never going to satisfy everybody. I always try, where possible, to couch my own language as if it were a member of my family being discussed.
“But I am elected to deliver a mandate, and part of that is to be absolutely unambiguous about women’s sport. For me, this is a really important issue. The reality is very simple: I have a responsibility to preserve the female category, and I will go on doing that until a successor decides otherwise or the science alters.”
Coe prepared to pursue justice
Where Coe can be distinguished from Bach is in the fact that he is not afraid of a temporary loss of popularity in order to pursue a just cause. He understood that if the central tenets of biology could not be upheld in athletics, often called the “mother of all sports” for the sheer simplicity of seeing who can run fastest and jump highest, then he was abrogating his duty of care.
This idea appears not even to have occurred to Bach, so preoccupied with trying to shore up his power base that he appears to have acquiesced to patently flawed schools of thought. Like Avery Brundage, who clung on to the presidency for 20 years, and Juan Antonio Samaranch, who did so for 21, he has gone on for far too long. Coe will doubtless face a crowded field of rivals if he decides to run. But after the IOC’s pitiful negligence on a fundamental issue, he is the only candidate who can restore some crucial common sense.