Monday, August 23, 2010

New racing categories?

Dear track and field athletes: Hope you like needles, because we're going to test your testosterone levels before every competition and enter you into the appropriate category the day of your race. Sure this will cost us millions and millions of dollars but since you all want things fair and fair seems to be based on the level of testosterone these days based on responses to Caster Semenya's latest race win, let's just do it.
It will be exciting, right? For us: we'll get to watch multiple race finals instead of just one. I mean you'll have no idea who your competition is until the race. You'll have no idea which category you'll be in until that race. This testing system will not only take care of people "on the very fringe of the normal athlete female biological composition" but those who get advantages from being at certain points in their menstrual cycle. And we won't have those silly labels like "fastest woman in the world"; we can just go with "fastest human with T level ____."
So raise your hand if you want fairness. And while it's up there we'll just draw a small amount of blood so we can see just how fringe you are or are not.

5 comments:

Diane said...

So--to be "fair"--this means that men will be tested, and those "on the very fringe of the normal athlete male biological composition" will be racing against women, yes?

ken said...

Absolutely! No more gender categories. Just testosterone level.

Helen said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Helen said...

(oh, for the edit function!) Too bad they weren't doing this during the Carl Lewis era. 'cause you can only imagine what gave HIM an edge. :-)

Anonymous said...

I think that in Paralympic competition they don't really know when they enter which category of event each competitor will be placed into. That only happens once each competitor has been assessed, and then is assigned a category of competition which is seen as most appropiate. Katharine