The last fortnight saw the IAAF World Championships being held in Berlin and plenty of outstanding performances, including Bolt’s 9.58 and 19.19, but the race that’s created the most controversy was undoubtedly the Women’s 800m, won comfortably by Caster Semenya. The problem seems to be that there are significant doubts about whether or not Caster is actually a woman. It’s clear from race photos that she’s lacking male genitalia, but otherwise her physique, facial bone structure and voice all suggest a maleness, as does the fact that she has shown testosterone levels three times higher than ‘normal’ women, and that she ran almost 2 seconds faster than the next woman, despite, in her own words, taking it easy for the last 200m!

Anyway, the IAAF have ordered comprehensive sex determination tests, which will take a couple of weeks to complete. For a more detailed analysis of what’s involved, this article at competitor.com, entitled What Is Caster Semenya? is worth a read.

Caster Semenya has become an overnight sensation. Regrettably it has been for her role in sport’s biggest current controversy – the question whether she might in fact be biologically part male. Some have simplified this question to a debate over whether Semenya is male or female, which is incorrect. Rather, the true question is whether Semenya may be intersex, which refers to a condition where ambiguous genitalia are present, and the genes don’t match up with the physiological development and appearance, making the classification of the person as either male or female is very difficult.

Intersex conditions result from what are called disorders of sexual development (DSDs). Authorities have suggested three broad categories of this condition. The first is that of a masculinized female; the second is an under-masculinized male; and the third is true hermaphroditism. In Semenya’s case, it would seem that one of the first two categories – the masculinzed female or under-masculinized male – may apply.

It has also been revealed that Dr. Ekkart Arbeit, the disgraced former East German coach, has been working with Semenya, so perhaps we’re seeing a return to the dark days of giving women such massive doses of steroids that they’ve developed male features. This article, on one of Arbeit’s previous subjects, Andreas (nee Heidi) Kreiger, is indicative of how things were in the GDR.

By the time Krieger arrived at the Dynamo Club [at 13yrs old], the doping officials - intoxicated by the success of their athletes - had taken steroid violations to scarcely believable levels. An average teenage girl produces about half a milligram of testosterone per day. Krieger, by the middle of her career, was being fed 30 milligrams of anabolic steroids each day, far in excess of Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter, at the height of his drugs programme.

State scientists also developed STS 646, an anabolic steroid that caused male characteristics in women at a rate 16 times that of Oral-Turinabol. It was distributed to coaches even though it had not been approved for human use, not even in stage one clinical trials. Even Höppner expressed his doubts, telling the Stasi that he was not willing to be held responsible. But Manfred Ewald, the president of the sports federation at the time, insisted that they were necessary and ordered an additional 63,000 tablets. Krieger was probably one of the recipients.

A fundamental tenet of testing for performance-enhancing drugs in sports is that an athlete can expect to be tested at any time, at any place, without warning. To enable this, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has the ‘whereabouts rule’. This rule states that those athletes on its target list, which in swimming’s case means the Top 50 in the world in each event, must keep WADA informed of where they’ll be for at least one hour each day. In practice, this means that the athlete will enter this data three months in advance, and then can change details via SMS, fax etc. according to circumstances. If a tester shows up to where the athlete has said they’ll be, and they’re nor there, it counts as a missed test. Three missed tests and you’re banned.

Now FIFA signed up to WADA’s anti-doping code ages ago, but they’re now complaining that the whereabouts rule shouldn’t apply to footballers, and that footballers should be treated differently to athletes in other sports.

The Guardian wonders why FIFA expects to be treated differently and mentions the results from a recent French study.

The answer, I believe, lies in the findings of a study carried by a French anti-doping agency, which tested hair samples from 138 professional athletes, including 32 footballers. (Unlike urine samples, where evidence of steroid use is “washed out” within days, hair samples can retain traces of drugs much longer.) The results — published in France last week but completely ignored in this country — revealed that seven players (21.8%) tested “positive” for some form of banned drug, a far greater proportion than that found in sports such as rugby and, ahem, cycling. It is a bad day indeed for football when it places higher in the league table of drug use than professional cycling, although, in fairness, there are reasons to be cautious about the French study.Most obviously, it took place only in France, which may or may not have a different culture of drug use than other European countries. Hair sample testing has no legal status in France, or anywhere else for that matter, and the identities of those who tested positive will never be revealed.

At last week’s Congress, FIFA agreed to sign up to WADA’s drug testing protocols and English players are not happy about it.

Availability requires that sportsmen and women must “provide accurate, current location information”, requiring that for an hour of every day they are accountable for their movements. This has become a huge issue for 30 top English players, who are mobilising against what they consider would amount to house arrest for the prescribed hour.

Michael Beloff QC has provided counsel to the PPF over what grounds it might have to mount a legal challenge to Fifa’s new rules. Initially the players hope to negotiate with the international game’s ruling body over scrapping the pool, insisting that football is not a sport at risk of doping.

They are claiming there’s no risk of cheating in a sport where you can earn $250,000 per week! Are they serious?

Marion Jones has finally admitted what most people have suspected ever since the BALCO story was unearthed: she was on the juice.

Citing a letter Jones sent to close family and friends, which was “read to the Washington Post by a person who had been given a copy of it,” Jones plans to plead guilty on Friday in New York to two counts of lying to federal agents about her drug use and an unrelated financial matter.

The Post reported that in the letter, Jones said she took the steroid produced by the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) known as “the clear” for two years beginning in 1999. Jones, 31, won five medals, including three gold, at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.