T
Tekkerz
Guest
From The Times
August 21, 2009
They’re all freaks now. So why pick on one?
The South African champion is mocked for being too ‘masculine’. But elite sport is now the preserve of the extraordinary
Antonia Senior
No one can be this good. All can not be as it seems. This athlete makes rivals look like amateurs with a 20-a-day fag habit. You can’t tell from the outside, just by looking, although many furtive sideways-glancers have tried. He looks like a man, walks like a man, talks like a man. But is he a man?
Let’s test him in public, with accompanying sniggers and pointing from the audience. He will be humiliated, but at least we sports fans will know once and for all. Is Michael Phelps actually a fish?
The piscine evidence against the multiple gold-medal-winning swimmer is damning. The average man is the same distance from outstretched fingertip to fingertip as he is tall. Phelps’s wingspan is 7.6cm more than his height. Think fins. He has the long torso of a man 10cm taller than him, finished off with short legs and extra large feet. Think Flipper. Put the man in the water with a school of black marlin, the fastest fish in the sea, and they would embrace him as a long-lost brother. Yet we have not, so far, demanded the tests to prove he is all parts man and no parts marlin. Instead we hail him as a champion.
Not so Caster Semenya. At the horribly vulnerable age of 18, the young South African athlete has been subject to vitriol and innuendo, and held up as an object of derision. She has committed an age-old transgression; she’s too masculine in her appearance, too aggressive in her pursuit of her goal. She has committed the crime of not being pretty enough or girly enough for public consumption.
BACKGROUND
Semenya exposed herself to this humiliation for the sake of her sport, winning the 800m at the World Athletics Championships this week. Yet her sport’s governing body, the inept International Association of Athletics Federations, has colluded in her public slaying, allowing the test to determine her gender to become gossip fodder. Meanwhile, her fellow athletes have been whipping up the aggression of the mob, which revels in baiting the odd one out.
If Semenya does have male chromosomes, so what? What exactly is the ethical difference between Phelps’s marlin-like qualities and her masculine ones? Where are the lines drawn, now that sport is increasingly the showground of the freakishly proportioned? Today’s sportsmen and women are fitter, faster, taller, bigger than their predecessors. They are colossi standing on the shoulders of pygmies.
Scientists at Duke University, North Carolina, compared athletes and swimmers competing today with those from 1900. They found that while the average human has gained about 1.9in in height, champion swimmers have grown 4.5in and champion runners 6.4in.
Usain Bolt, with his long femurs and extraordinary frame, takes 40 to 41 strides to run the 100m, compared with 45 to 48 for his rivals. Eddie Tolan, of America, ran a similar time to Usain Bolt in 1929 — but over 100 yards. Tolan, an Olympic gold medal-winner in 1932, was 11ins shorter than Bolt. The trend is obvious across a range of sports. American football players, rugby players, basketball players; they are all enormous. Huge. Massive.
In the early days of sport, when globalisation meant Empire, leisure was the luxury of a few. There was a smaller gene pool from which to draw athletes. In 1900 those miniature runners would win a cup and a hearty handshake, before celebrating with a sherry and a cigar.
Now sport is at the forefront of globalisation. Money pours into it, from governments, fans and business. The best can win extraordinary fame and riches. The sporting dream is not just about winning glory and honour, but about winning the lottery.
The oddly proportioned now find themselves caught up in the global trawl for sporting heroes, intensively trained like battery athletes, and spewed on to the world stage for fans’ edification. Now that the net is cast so wide, and the money is there to turn the freaks into winners, it is not surprising that we find the biggest and the weirdest and make them into athletes.
The route to success is brutal, even for those of the right shape and proportions. Those women athletes who begrudge Semenya her success have all sacrificed the usual pleasures of teenage life — hanging out, laziness, cheap cider, illicit cigarettes, friends, lovers — for the hope of a few fleeting seconds of glory. Most will only watch, breathless, from the desultory losing places. We are taught that hard work and application can win dreams. It is a lie. Hard work coupled with extra long femurs can mean that, if you are lucky, you might be, say, the fourth best athlete in your sport. You would still be amazingly, unbelievably good. Just not as amazingly good as the people better than you. All that time, effort and pain for what? As Homer Simpson once said, trying is just the first step towards failure.
Much of the science concerning why some people are better at sport than others is in its infancy. There is a camp in China where children are genetically tested to determine if they have athletic ability, but at present it’s more astrology than predictive testing.
When the technology improves, there are dangerous implications. Dictators love sporting prowess; the Eastern European women who were unwittingly fed hormones are testament to how much attention is paid to the athlete’s welfare in the state’s pursuit of glory. How far will this trend towards freakishness go?
Semenya, unlike her Eastern European predecessors, did not grow up being force-fed steroids. She did, however, grow up without electricity or running water. Once, the circus of world sport would have passed by her village without noticing her. Now, she has been given a lottery ticket. At 18 years old, aware that if she won she could unlock both riches and a new storm of wounding speculation, she stood tall and faced the track. That she ran at all is heroic and amazing. That she won is not.
August 21, 2009
They’re all freaks now. So why pick on one?
The South African champion is mocked for being too ‘masculine’. But elite sport is now the preserve of the extraordinary
Antonia Senior
No one can be this good. All can not be as it seems. This athlete makes rivals look like amateurs with a 20-a-day fag habit. You can’t tell from the outside, just by looking, although many furtive sideways-glancers have tried. He looks like a man, walks like a man, talks like a man. But is he a man?
Let’s test him in public, with accompanying sniggers and pointing from the audience. He will be humiliated, but at least we sports fans will know once and for all. Is Michael Phelps actually a fish?
The piscine evidence against the multiple gold-medal-winning swimmer is damning. The average man is the same distance from outstretched fingertip to fingertip as he is tall. Phelps’s wingspan is 7.6cm more than his height. Think fins. He has the long torso of a man 10cm taller than him, finished off with short legs and extra large feet. Think Flipper. Put the man in the water with a school of black marlin, the fastest fish in the sea, and they would embrace him as a long-lost brother. Yet we have not, so far, demanded the tests to prove he is all parts man and no parts marlin. Instead we hail him as a champion.
Not so Caster Semenya. At the horribly vulnerable age of 18, the young South African athlete has been subject to vitriol and innuendo, and held up as an object of derision. She has committed an age-old transgression; she’s too masculine in her appearance, too aggressive in her pursuit of her goal. She has committed the crime of not being pretty enough or girly enough for public consumption.
BACKGROUND
Semenya exposed herself to this humiliation for the sake of her sport, winning the 800m at the World Athletics Championships this week. Yet her sport’s governing body, the inept International Association of Athletics Federations, has colluded in her public slaying, allowing the test to determine her gender to become gossip fodder. Meanwhile, her fellow athletes have been whipping up the aggression of the mob, which revels in baiting the odd one out.
If Semenya does have male chromosomes, so what? What exactly is the ethical difference between Phelps’s marlin-like qualities and her masculine ones? Where are the lines drawn, now that sport is increasingly the showground of the freakishly proportioned? Today’s sportsmen and women are fitter, faster, taller, bigger than their predecessors. They are colossi standing on the shoulders of pygmies.
Scientists at Duke University, North Carolina, compared athletes and swimmers competing today with those from 1900. They found that while the average human has gained about 1.9in in height, champion swimmers have grown 4.5in and champion runners 6.4in.
Usain Bolt, with his long femurs and extraordinary frame, takes 40 to 41 strides to run the 100m, compared with 45 to 48 for his rivals. Eddie Tolan, of America, ran a similar time to Usain Bolt in 1929 — but over 100 yards. Tolan, an Olympic gold medal-winner in 1932, was 11ins shorter than Bolt. The trend is obvious across a range of sports. American football players, rugby players, basketball players; they are all enormous. Huge. Massive.
In the early days of sport, when globalisation meant Empire, leisure was the luxury of a few. There was a smaller gene pool from which to draw athletes. In 1900 those miniature runners would win a cup and a hearty handshake, before celebrating with a sherry and a cigar.
Now sport is at the forefront of globalisation. Money pours into it, from governments, fans and business. The best can win extraordinary fame and riches. The sporting dream is not just about winning glory and honour, but about winning the lottery.
The oddly proportioned now find themselves caught up in the global trawl for sporting heroes, intensively trained like battery athletes, and spewed on to the world stage for fans’ edification. Now that the net is cast so wide, and the money is there to turn the freaks into winners, it is not surprising that we find the biggest and the weirdest and make them into athletes.
The route to success is brutal, even for those of the right shape and proportions. Those women athletes who begrudge Semenya her success have all sacrificed the usual pleasures of teenage life — hanging out, laziness, cheap cider, illicit cigarettes, friends, lovers — for the hope of a few fleeting seconds of glory. Most will only watch, breathless, from the desultory losing places. We are taught that hard work and application can win dreams. It is a lie. Hard work coupled with extra long femurs can mean that, if you are lucky, you might be, say, the fourth best athlete in your sport. You would still be amazingly, unbelievably good. Just not as amazingly good as the people better than you. All that time, effort and pain for what? As Homer Simpson once said, trying is just the first step towards failure.
Much of the science concerning why some people are better at sport than others is in its infancy. There is a camp in China where children are genetically tested to determine if they have athletic ability, but at present it’s more astrology than predictive testing.
When the technology improves, there are dangerous implications. Dictators love sporting prowess; the Eastern European women who were unwittingly fed hormones are testament to how much attention is paid to the athlete’s welfare in the state’s pursuit of glory. How far will this trend towards freakishness go?
Semenya, unlike her Eastern European predecessors, did not grow up being force-fed steroids. She did, however, grow up without electricity or running water. Once, the circus of world sport would have passed by her village without noticing her. Now, she has been given a lottery ticket. At 18 years old, aware that if she won she could unlock both riches and a new storm of wounding speculation, she stood tall and faced the track. That she ran at all is heroic and amazing. That she won is not.
