TESTED

EPISODE FOUR: RUNNING IN CIRCLES

—

by

rose
in

In 2009, South African sprinter Caster Semenya won gold at the World Championships. But instead of a celebration, she endured endless speculation about her body, her biology, and her gender. And soon, sports organizations would launch a new round of regulations, lead to multiple court cases, and require sporting organizations to justify their claim that DSD athletes have an unfair advantage.

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TRANSCRIPT

Rose Eveleth: In the spring of 2023, Namibian track superstar Christine Mboma was presented with that big, hard choice: alter her body’s testosterone levels, or stop racing at the elite level in the female category.

In some ways, Christine says that decision was easy: she would take the meds. She wasn’t ready to give up on racing just yet. But the next part was trickier: actually getting her testosterone levels down to the mandated amount. Figuring that out fell to someone very close to Christine.

Rose: Did you ever imagine that you would actually be involved in, like, dealing with something like this?
Elize Botha: Look, I was willing to, but I know as a normal general practitioner, this is something way above my head, sort of, eh?

Rose Eveleth: This is Elize Botha — the wife of Christine’s coach, Henk. Elize is a doctor, but she’s not a specialist in hormone manipulation — that would be the job of an endocrinologist.1 Still, she felt like she had to at least try to help Christine figure this out.

The rules tell athletes what they have to do — get their testosterone levels down to below a certain number — but World Athletics says very little about how to do it. And Elize says that when she reached out to World Athletics for help, she got the same response over and over again:

Elize Botha: Go back to your regulations. And then it’s written in such, uh, language or such words that, you know, lawyers, how they, how they draw up some contracts, you know, you don’t understand. And I mean, it’s not that I’m stupid, but it was really — you don’t know what’s going on there 100%.

Rose Eveleth: The regulations say that athletes should consult their medical teams for advice. But in some parts of the world, even elite athletes like Christine don’t have medical teams.

Elize Botha: We are in Africa. I mean, we are, they just give us a bunch of emails and we don’t have any funds. We’ve done these things from our pocket. I had to beg them almost for assistance.

Rose Eveleth: Elize spent hours doing research and calling experts, trying to figure out how to actually get Christine’s testosterone levels down to the mandated amount. In past cases, World Athletics has argued that all that is required is a regular dose of oral contraceptive. But Elize found it nearly impossible to get Christine reliably below the mandated level just on the pill alone.

Eventually, they wound up switching to a combination of oral contraceptives and an injection meant to completely stop the production of testosterone in the body.

Unlike other runners who have tried to lower their testosterone, Christine says she isn’t feeling too many side effects. The worst part, she told me, is actually having to do the injection.

Christine Mboma: When you inject, you feel numb and after a day, then you just feel so sore, like it’s pain in here. Mhm. Yeah. Feel like someone’s stabbed you.

Rose Eveleth: This combination worked, but maybe a little too well. When I visited Namibia in January, they had just realized that Christine’s levels of testosterone had plummeted far below their target. And Elize was worried that wasn’t healthy for her. So they stopped the oral contraception, and stuck with the injection. And Henk tells me that they’re still always worried, always monitoring her, because they don’t really know what the longer term side effects might be for her.

This is all an experiment, and one that none of them want to be doing. In fact, it’s an experiment that the World Medical Association has stated is medically unethical — because it’s not necessary medical treatment, for a person’s health.2 Which puts Elize, the doctor, on complicated moral ground.

Elize Botha: We don’t have a choice. I mean, Christine want to run. She really wants to. So no, I didn’t even think — I didn’t even let myself think about that. We had to obey by the rules.

Rose Eveleth: These rules that Elize, Christine and Henk are trying to obey are just the latest in this long story of sex regulation that sort of… keeps repeating itself.

Remember, sex testing was supposed to have ended. “Victory is ours!” that fax from 1999 had said. So what happened? How did we go from victory, the end of sex testing… to Christine today, trying to comply with a new set of regulations? How did this whole thing start up all over again?

It turns out, the reprieve from sex testing was short-lived. And all it took to start this game of biological whack-a-mole all over again… was one athlete.

BBC announcer: It’s a new South African Record for Caster Semenya.
ABC reporter: Caster Semenya…
CBS reporter: South African runner Caster Semenya…
Madeleine Pape: So certainly I’d heard about a runner called Caster Semenya.
Celestine Karoney: Caster Semenya…
Caster Semenya: Your ceilings will be written Caster Semenya.

Rose Eveleth: From CBC and NPR’s Embedded, this is TESTED. I’m Rose Eveleth.

In 2009, Celestine Karoney, was covering a track and field event in Nairobi for Kenya Television Network. And she started hearing a rumor.

Celestine Karoney: Some athletes told us, oy, this new girl in the 800m, we really doubt whether she’s female. And I’m like, yo, backup. What do you mean? And they were like, we are not sure about her. For them, it was how she looks and how she speaks. And one of them actually was like, I thought she was just too fast for a girl. And I didn’t, I honestly didn’t make anything of it until the 2009 World Championships. When now all hell, so to speak, broke loose.

CBC announcer: Caster Semenya of South Africa has drawn all sorts of attention.

Rose Eveleth: Caster Semenya became the talk of track and field when she showed up at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin.

Madeleine Pape: Before the final there started to be kind of like, breakfast room conversation let’s say around Caster Semenya’s right to compete. Questions being asked about her gender and if she belonged in the women’s category.

Rose Eveleth: This is Madeleine Pape. She was in Berlin to compete for Australia in the 800, and she actually raced against Caster in the heats.

And in the final, Caster smoked everybody.3

CBC announcer: This is a junior — an African junior champion — who has come out of nowhere and is running away with this World Championship final. 1:55.46! The fastest time again in the world this year for this unknown, Caster Semenya of South Africa.

Madeleine Pape: People expected her to win, but then they didn’t really know how to react when she did.4

Rose Eveleth: After the race, a few athletes spoke up. Most notably, the Italian runner Elisa Cusma told the press that “These kind of people should not run with us. For me, she is not a woman. She is a man.”5

And it wasn’t just the runners. Jörg Krieger, who worked as a volunteer at the event, says he remembers walking into the World Athletics president’s booth while a meeting was going on, and hearing them discussing Caster.6

Jörg Krieger: And the question was, what to do with this individual? And they were talking about her appearances, but they were also talking about the way she was behaving or her voice, and all the things that were not fitting, in their, understanding of what a woman should be like, one was talking about rumors of her genitals and, and that was just, well, too much for me.

Rose Eveleth: And this conversation wasn’t just happening privately. It was also happening very publicly.

ABC reporter 1: New information about the South African runner accused of lying about her gender.

ABC reporter 2: Questions that have been raised because of Semenya’s tremendous speed, muscular physique and deep voice.

CBS reporter: If she runs like a man, and talks like a man, is she a man?

Rose Eveleth: Pierre Weiss, the general secretary of the IAAF — the governing body of track and field, now known as World Athletics — told reporters that, “She is a woman, but maybe not 100 percent.”7

At this point in time, mandatory sex testing had ended, and World Athletics had no rules regulating women with variations in their biology. All that was left was that more vague concession you heard about in that victory fax from 1999: an appointed medical official could “arrange for the determination of the gender of the competitor should he judge that to be desirable.” And when it came to Caster Semenya, they apparently deemed it desirable.

ABC reporter: Semenya is now undergoing a rigorous series of tests to determine her gender. Tests that include a gynecologist who examined her genitals and endocrinologist who examined her hormones and an internal medicine specialist to look at her organs.

Rose Eveleth: Those tests showed that Caster has the same thing Christine does — a difference of sex development. In November of 2009, Caster says that the IAAF contacted her team privately and offered up a deal.

We reached out to Caster for this series, but were never able to get an interview with her.

But in her memoir, called The Race to be Myself,8 Caster says that the organization suggested that she go the surgical route — have an operation called a gonadectomy, to remove the organs that were producing the testosterone in her body. World Athletics has stated in the past that it never pushed the surgical option.

In the memoir Caster describes the proposal with horror. (The voice here is the audiobook’s narrator.)

Audiobook narrator: That is their offer? To cut me open? You can tell them I said to go cut their mothers. They can go cut out pieces of their mothers. These motherfuckers. What kind of nonsense is this?

Rose Eveleth: So… surgery was off the table.

Eventually, Caster’s team worked out an arrangement with the IAAF. Here’s Celestine Karoney, the Kenyan reporter.

Celestine Karoney: Caster Semenya reached an agreement with World Athletics after the whole 2009 drama that she will take medication to lower testosterone levels. She said, I did it out of desperation to stay in the sport.

Rose Eveleth: According to Caster’s memoir, they agreed that, if she could reach a certain threshold for testosterone, and stay there for six months, she could return to competition.

This was, as far as we know, the first time the IAAF had offered an athlete this kind of choice — the option to alter her body in order to, literally, stay in the race.

And remember, this wasn’t part of any official policy. It was just between Caster and the people in charge of track and field. In fact, the whole deal was done in secret. According to her memoir, only her partner, her lawyers and her manager knew she was taking drugs to suppress her testosterone. Every month she did blood tests, to prove to the IAAF that she was keeping her levels down. And she suffered through the side effects quietly — bloating, hot flashes, fatigue, headaches, nausea. She says she felt cloudy a lot of the time, and had trouble sleeping.

Here’s Caster, from a recent interview with the BBC.

Caster Semenya: Running on that medication was always under stress. My health was always, you know, up and down, always sick every day. Panic attacks. It was hard.9

Rose Eveleth: Eventually, in July of 2010, almost a year after the World Championships in Berlin, Caster got back out on the track — now with lowered testosterone. And despite all those side effects, she started winning again.

ITV reporter: Caster Semenya has impressed in two performances since an 11-month absence while authorities investigated her ambiguous gender.

Rose Eveleth: This was a really wild moment, because Caster and the IAAF had made their deal — she was medicating — but nobody else knew. Because it was all private.

AP reporter: It is still unclear if the runner has undergone any medical procedure or treatment during the lengthy layoff that allowed her to keep running as a woman.

Rose Eveleth: This wasn’t a sustainable solution — to have just one athlete secretly taking medication, with no official rule on the books.

But an official rule was coming… and it would pull women off the track once again.

☀︎ ☀︎ ☀︎ BREAK ☀︎ ☀︎ ☀︎

Rose Eveleth: In 2011, the International Olympic Committee held a press conference announcing new rules regarding female athletes like Caster. The rules would apply to both the Olympics, and World Athletics events.10

Here’s IOC President Jacques Rogge, from the press conference:

Jacques Rogge: There are individuals that have a very high level of male hormones — mostly testosterone. This high level gives an unfair advantage to these individuals and we have now defined rules and we are defining a monitoring strategy.

Rose Eveleth: Male hormones, he says. What does that mean? Shall we return to high school biology for a moment?

Science film narrator: A high point of growing up occurs when the juices start running and you begin to move physically from boyhood to manhood. As a male, the focal point of sexual maturity is found in your reproductive organs.

Rose Eveleth: And those reproductive organs make some very important stuff.

Science film narrator: For puberty, they start producing the male sex hormones chemicals called androgens, of which testosterone is the principal one. Manliness results from the male hormone testosterone. Now, let’s move to the reproductive organs of the female. When a girl reaches 12 to 15 years of age, her ovaries begin to manufacture female hormones called estrogens.

Rose Eveleth: Sound familiar? Testosterone is the man juice. Estrogen is the lady juice. And that’s that. But… that’s not quite the full picture. So let’s try again.

All human beings have both testosterone and estrogen in their bodies. In fact, having both is necessary for normal biological function.11 In general, cis men have higher natural levels of testosterone than cis women. Doctors measure testosterone using a metric called nanomoles per liter. Cis women tend to fall between .3 and 2.5 nmol/L. And the average cis male range is between 9 and 32.12

Don’t worry… there will not be a quiz on this.

But one reason World Athletics believes that Caster has an unfair advantage is the way this higher testosterone level affects the body during puberty.13 Here’s Alun Williams, a sports genomics professor at Manchester Metropolitan University, talking about the impact of testosterone.

Alun Williams: You know, males on average will grow taller, longer limbs and so on, bigger, stronger muscles, particularly around the upper body, sort of across the chest and shoulders. You get extra growth of the organs related to exercise performance, things like the heart, even the liver and kidneys and so on and the lungs.
Rose Eveleth: And so if someone has more testosterone, are they just like going to be better at sports?
Alun Williams: Well, so having said what I’ve just said about testosterone and how important it is, of course, it’s not quite like that.

Rose Eveleth: The way testosterone works in the body is complicated, and varies from person to person. Some women are super sensitive to it, and others are not.

But since they needed some biological element to base the rules on, and using the Y chromosome was off the table, the governing body of track and field went with testosterone as the basis of their new rules.

Those 2011 rules were formally called the “Hyperandrogenism Regulations.”14

Hyperandrogenism isn’t a DSD — it’s a more general term that basically means having high testosterone.15 There’s no agreed upon medical threshold for what testosterone level merits that description. But World Athletics decided that for their purposes, the cutoff would be 10 nanomoles per liter.

That’s right at the bottom of the so-called “male range” of testosterone.

It’s not clear how they landed on that number, and the testosterone target in the rules would eventually change — from 10 to 5, and now today, for Christine, down to 2.5.

These rules didn’t mean a return to blanket sex testing. But they allowed the IAAF to test any woman if there were “reasonable grounds” to suspect she might have high testosterone. And if you scroll deep into the rules, to Appendix 2, you’ll see some descriptions of what the sports authorities would consider reasonable grounds.

For example, there are line drawings of different amounts of hair someone might observe on a body, on the upper lip, the chest, the back. There is also a scale — with more drawings — showing different breast sizes.

Katrina Karkazis: What’s happening is people are looking at women and deciding, “Actually, I think there’s something different about your biology. And I think you might not actually be a woman.”

Rose Eveleth: That’s Katrina Karkazis, a cultural anthropologist at Amherst College. She’s the author of a book called Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography.16

And this is as good a moment as any, to address an elephant in the room. As Katrina puts it:

Katrina Karkazis: Why is it black and brown women from the global South?

Rose Eveleth: In this new era of gender verification, starting in 2009, every single woman I know of from my reporting who has been challenged, and impacted by these regulations, is a Black or brown woman from the global South.

A lot of people — including some athletes — have called the DSD policies racist.17 Over and over, as I traveled around the world reporting on this, when I asked coaches, athletes, and fans why they thought these policies existed, I heard a very similar answer:

Person at Kavango River: Yeah, because it’s a black girl.
Erastus Someno: It’s because she’s African.
Kelvin Chiringa: The global north countries undermine us in this particular way, that’s how we feel, that’s how we see.
Annet Negesa: Yeah, it’s like they’re just targeting us. We blacks and also athletes from the global South, because now they are saying that we are dominating.

Rose Eveleth: That last voice you heard was Annet Negesa, an athlete from Uganda who was impacted by these 2011 regulations.18

Annet Negesa: Sometimes I think of discrimination whereby now we don’t — we no longer have like a fair play in the game. Yeah. Also racism as in they are taking us to be like inferior people as if we don’t understand. Yeah, yeah. They’re taking themselves to be superior. Like they know everything.

Rose Eveleth: We can’t know for sure why this imbalance exists. But according to my reporting, there may be a variety of factors playing into it.

First of all, there’s this idea floating around that African women are more likely to have DSDs. Here’s Ross Tucker, an exercise physiologist, speaking on a podcast called The Science of Sport.

Ross Tucker: The reality is that this policy will affect athletes who are African more than it will affect them from the rest of the world, because there’s good reason to believe that these medical conditions are more common, more prevalent in Africa.

Rose Eveleth: But other experts argue that there is no solid evidence that this is the case19. Amanda Lock Swarr is a professor at the University of Washington, and author of the book Envisioning African Intersex. And she says that despite the lack of evidence, this idea has persisted.

Amanda Lock Swarr: It was repeated in the media. It was repeated in museums. It was, repeated by, you know, athletic regulators. It’s repeated in the contemporary moment by athletes. So it sort of takes on a life of its own.

Rose Eveleth: So, it’s possible that more African women are flagged for testing because of this unproven assumption.20

Another factor is cultural. Historically, most of the people in charge of track and field — as well as the medical experts they consult with — are from North America or Europe.21 It’s not clear, in most cases, who specifically initiates challenges. But it’s possible that some sports officials from the Global North are misunderstanding gender presentation from other parts of the world.22 Here’s Dr. Casey Orozco-Poore, a medical resident at UCLA who specializes in intersex health:

Casey Orozco-Poore: You know what if that person like me, is Latin American and is born with body hair, born with upper lip hair, is born, maybe more masculine features… It’s just how I look! Like, I, to my knowledge, do not have abnormally high testosterone. I just come from a hairy family.

Rose Eveleth: Finally, there’s an issue of global differences in healthcare. In some parts of the world — the wealthier global North, generally — children are born in hospitals and attend regular medical checkups.23 What that means is that in the global North, kids with intersex variations are often identified by doctors when they are infants or young children.24

In the global South, people tend to have less access to healthcare.25 So it’s less likely that kids with DSDs get noticed. And so the first time they find out that there’s anything different about their body, is when a sports organization asks them to take a test.

World Athletics has disputed any suggestion that their policies are racist. In a response to a Human Rights Watch report on the distinct racial imbalance surrounding these policies, they wrote, “We remain committed to fairness for women in sport and reject the allegation that biological limits are based on race or gender stereotypes.”26

In 2022, World Athletics president Sebastian Coe told the Independent that “I’m really over having any more of these discussions with second-rate sociologists who sit there trying to tell me or the science community that there may be some issue.”27

Okay… with all that in mind, let’s go back to those 2011 rules.

Caster was already taking the drugs, so she kept taking them, and racing. But now that the policy existed, it meant that more women started being pulled out of sports again.

And one of those athletes was an Indian sprinter named Dutee Chand. In 2012, Dutee became India’s national record holder in the 100 meters in the under-18 category.28

After a series of wins, Dutee was flagged for hyperandrogenism, and tested. When the results came back, Dutee said she was told by an official that she was no longer eligible to compete for India because her “male hormone” levels were too high. Based on the rules at the time, she would have to lower that testosterone, just like Caster.

But unlike Caster, Dutee said… no.

And she took the IAAF to court, arguing that the rules were unjust. In the history of sex testing, this was the first formal, legal challenge that sports authorities had faced.

The only venue where an athlete can challenge rules like this is the Court of Arbitration for Sport, or CAS, in Switzerland.29

Carlos Sayao: The Court of Arbitration for sport is sometimes known as kind of the Supreme Court of sports. It’s a bit of a misnomer because it’s not actually a court. You know, it’s it’s something like a private association of Swiss law.

Rose Eveleth: This is Carlos Sayao, one of the lawyers who worked on Dutee’s case.

In addition to lawyers, Dutee was accompanied by an athletes rights advocate named Payoshni Mitra. Over the last ten years, she’s become the go-to person for athletes who are impacted by these rules. She sat beside Dutee during the case.30

Dutee speaks Hindi, but the entire case was conducted in English.

Payoshni Mitra: Which meant that Dutee did not understand anything. And after a very long session, I will summarize and explain to her what was happening. It was absolutely unfair, because it was a case about her, her body. And she was sitting there and yet not being able to understand what was being discussed.

Rose Eveleth: Dutee’s panel of expert witnesses argued that the sports organization didn’t actually have any evidence to prove that she had an unfair advantage.31 And without evidence, they said it was unethical and unjust to ask athletes to medicate in order to compete.

And after a week-long case of arguments… Dutee won.32 CAS struck down the regulations, saying that the IAAF had not provided sufficient evidence of advantage to justify the rules.33

And Payoshni thought… that was that.

Payoshni Mitra: I did think that we have won it. We have changed. You know, you’ve changed how sport is policed for women’s bodies and sport is policed, and it’s going to go forever. This is it. That’s how I saw it at that point. Yes.

Rose Eveleth: In her book, Caster writes about getting the call about Dutee winning the case. She was in a hotel in Austria after a race, packing up her stuff. Here’s how she remembers it, again read by the audiobook narrator.

Audiobook narrator: I didn’t know what I was feeling. But I stopped taking the medication that day. I threw the pills I had with me in the trash. I felt the first stirrings of hope in my chest.

Rose Eveleth: That was 2015. And so what happens next is that … athletes go back to being able to compete without any restrictions. And not just Dutee… Athletes like Max Imali, who goes on to win her national titles.

KBC announcer: 23.12 seconds. It’s a new national record.

Rose Eveleth: Caster goes to the 2016 Rio Olympics, and wins gold.34

BBC Announcer: But Semenya now steps on the accelerator, moves away from the rest of the field then Niyonsaba, Melissa Bishop trying to hold up one but one boot, is going to gather Semenya as the champion.

Rose Eveleth: But while the athletes were racing… World Athletics was working. Because the CAS decision was a provisional ruling.

The court agreed with Dutee and her team, that World Athletics didn’t have enough evidence to prove that these women had an unfair advantage. But it offered them a two year grace period to find it.

Coming up… World Athletics finds their evidence. But not everybody is convinced.

Roger Pielke: And so my, I don’t know, my bullshit detector kind of went nuts. Ding, ding, ding ding! And said, you know, how can this be? Let’s go look at this data and figure out what’s going on.

CREDITS

You’ve been listening to Tested, from CBC, NPR’s Embedded, and Bucket of Eels. The show is written, reported, and hosted by me, Rose Eveleth.

Editing by Alison MacAdam and Veronica Simmonds. Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman, Andrew Mambo, and Rhaina Cohen. Additional development, reporting, producing, and editing by Lisa Pollak. Sound design by Mitra Kaboli. Our production manager is Michael Kamel. Anna Ashitey is our digital producer. This series was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Fact checking by Dania Suleman. Our intersex script consultant is Hans Lindahl. Legal support from Beverly Davis. Archival research by Hillary Dann.

Special thanks to Kathi Isham, Chris Zollo, and the rest of the team at the Medical Historical Library at Yale University.

At CBC, Chris Oke and Cesil Fernandes are Executive Producers, Tanya Springer is the Senior Manager, and Arif Noorani is the Director of CBC Podcasts.

At NPR, Katie Simon is Supervising Editor for Embedded. Irene Noguchi is Executive Producer. NPR’s senior vice president for podcasting is Collin Campbell. We got legal support from Micah Ratner. And specials thanks to NPR’s Managing Editor for Standards and Practices, Tony Cavin.

This series was created with support from a New America fellowship.

  1. For more information on intersex experiences with hormone replacement therapy, see this video. ↩︎
  2. See the WMA statement here. ↩︎
  3. You can watch the race here. ↩︎
  4. Madeleine has spoken a lot about how she changed her mind about Caster, including in this 2021 TEDx talk and this 2019 NPR interview. ↩︎
  5. See this article. ↩︎
  6. Jörg is now an academic who studies sports history, and the author of a book called Power and Politics in World Athletics. ↩︎
  7. See this article. ↩︎
  8. Available here. ↩︎
  9. You can listen to the full interview here. ↩︎
  10. See the World Athletics press release and the IOC press release. ↩︎
  11. Having low testosterone more commonly impacts cis men than cis women, but hypoandrogenism is a real problem for some women, too. ↩︎
  12. Depending on where you look, you’ll see different numbers of averages like this. And it’s worth noting that in many cases, these averages are built by excluding women with sex variations. Some studies suggest that elite female athletes have higher average testosterone levels more generally, DSD conditions or not. And some experts argue that World Athletics is measuring the wrong kind of testosterone. ↩︎
  13. This is also the reason World Athletics believe that trans women should not be allowed to compete. Their 2023 press release around trans women states that “the Council has agreed to exclude male-to-female transgender athletes who have been through male puberty from female World Rankings competition.” World Athletics has different policies for trans and DSD athletes. ↩︎
  14. You can see a full copy of the regulations here. ↩︎
  15. For more about DSD diagnoses, see our explainer. ↩︎
  16. For more detail on Katrina’s critique of the 2011 policy, see this article. Malcolm Ferguson-Smith, who you heard in episode three, also worked on a critique of this policy. For one defense of the 2011 policy, see this article cowritten by Maria Patiño, who you also heard about in episode three. ↩︎
  17. For one example, see this article. ↩︎
  18. You’ll hear more from Annet in episode six, but her story was a central part of this 2020 Human Rights Watch report about sex testing. ↩︎
  19. This idea is also rooted in eugenic ideas about black Africans being subhuman, and therefor more like animals. ↩︎
  20. For more information, see Amanda’s book. ↩︎
  21. For more information, see Jörg’s book. ↩︎
  22. We are, as you can tell, very careful in this section about how we phrase things. Others have been more assertive about this idea. Read here, here and here. ↩︎
  23. For more information, see this report. ↩︎
  24. This is actually something that activists say isn’t always a good thing. See this 2017 HRW report for more information. ↩︎
  25. For a global South perspective on this, see this article. ↩︎
  26. See this article. ↩︎
  27. See this article. ↩︎
  28. For more from Dutee, check out this Radiolab episode. ↩︎
  29. Here’s what the main CAS building looks like. ↩︎
  30. Payoshni has also spoken about that Human Rights Watch report we mentioned earlier — you can read her interview here. ↩︎
  31. Witnesses who testified on Dutee’s behalf included Payoshni Mitra, Katrina Karkazis, and Madeleine Pape. ↩︎
  32. For more on Dutee’s story, see this 2020 TEDx talk she gave. ↩︎
  33. For more information, see CAS documentation of the case. ↩︎
  34. You can watch the race here. ↩︎