The Editor, Sir:

The response of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to the phenomenal performance of South African Caster Semenya in the 800 metres women's event at the World Championships of Athletics which recently concluded in Berlin is at best collossally insensitive and at worst outright racism.

According to medical tests conducted by a panel of medical experts at the insistence of the IAAF, Semenya is a hermaphrodite with internal testes and no ovary nor womb. The findings have been leaked to newspapers and media houses all over the world. It has, therefore, exposed the athlete's private medical information which at least should have been first corroborated by non-European medical experts prior to being released and before the athlete herself has been advised or given an opportunity to respond to the findings.

The feeding frenzy is likely to do irreparable damage to the 18-year-old South African woman. This is not a drugs test in which the athlete is supposed to have been complicit in wrongdoing. This is information of the most private and personal nature. It has been collossally and cynically mishandled. Pierre Weiss, general secretary of the IAAF, has admitted that this is the eighth gender case that the IAAF has dealt with in four years. In 2006, an Indian 800 metre runner Santhi Soudarajan was stripped of her silver medal at the Asian Games after 'failing' a sex test. She was later found to have androgen insensitivity syndrome and was reported to have made suicide attempts subsequent to the tests.

With that experience in mind, the public disembowelling of 18-year-old black South African Caster Semenya is unpardonable. In none of the previous test in which gender duplicity has been the issue, has the IAAF felt the liberty to indulge a media feeding frenzy with someone's personal, private and confidential medical information.

Did the athlete give consent?

Four questions demand to be addressed by the IAAF in this matter: First, did Semenya consent to have these 'sex' tests done? Why was the usual panel, including gynaecologists, psychologists and an expert on gender or transgender issues, to conduct interview with the athlete not empanelled? Did the athlete consent to the release of the results of the tests? And, at what point was the athlete advised of the results of these tests, before or after they were made public?

There are two issues which arise, which are not new but are present in pernicious ways in this matter: The first is the issue of double standards by the IAAF in how black athletes and athletes from developing countries are handled when compared to other athletes. There is no doubt that similar issues or issues generally affecting the personal lives of European and American athletes are not handled with the lack of sensitivity to the athletes with which Semenya's has been handled. There is a certain disproportionality between the public relation value of the achievement, production and performance of these athletes from the developing world and the regard and sensitivity with which they are held and treated.

The second issue is the way this mishandling of the medical/personal information of Semenya represents the thin edge of the wedge to the return to the past and signals the future. When Jesse Owens outclassed the world in Berlin in 1936, tests were done to determine the relationship between the black man and the horse. America, the land of his birth, made movies and ran ads depicting Owens out-competing horses.

Questions of gender duplicity have been raised in relation to the Williams sisters in tennis, and, in this regard, it should be noted that Semenya did not break the world record for the Women's 800 metres. She, however, won by a similar margin that Usain Bolt did in the 200 metres. Will some tests be done to offer a bio-genetic explanation for the fact that Bolt is a breed apart.

Mistreatment

The mistreatment of Semenya is wrong because it treats the athlete as a non-person. It has robbed her of her privacy and by that jettisoned her future as a young woman. It has betrayed the fact that though human beings have improved in their physical prowess and achievements, in conduct and values we live in the shadows of Hitler's Germany.

I am, etc.,

GARNETT ROPER

Kingston