The long-fingered pianist: A look at the Caster Semenya ruling
When someone competes in a music competition, there’s no equity based on their natural predispositions to any given instrument. If someone naturally has good ombiture, they get to play a wind instrument. If someone has long fingers, they get to play the piano or stringed instruments. If someone has a good internal rhythm, they get to play percussion. If you can play an instrument well, you get to compete with everyone else. Saxophone players aren’t made to run a mile before they compete if their ombiture is too good, and long-fingered pianists aren’t forced to use pianos with oversized keys. If you’re lucky enough to have a natural advantage, judges won’t use it to barre you from competition, or even deduct from your overall score. Even if you’re lucky enough to have perfect pitch, an advantage that allows you to tell every note that’s being played without a reference, you just get to compete like everyone else.
Caster Semenya doesn’t have that luxury.
She’s a two-time Olympic champion in the 800m run, and she has a naturally high level of testosterone. Following multiple hearings and reviews, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which acts as the governing body for international track and field, says she has to either take hormones to lower her level of testosterone or run in events that are longer than the mile. According to the rulings, her natural level of testosterone gives her an advantage at events between 400m and the mile, so she’s currently barred from those events unless a future decision rules in her favor. That means that she might not be able to compete and defend her 800m title at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. She’s tried to run the 5,000m race to continue to compete internationally, but her time was a mere 16:05 compared to the 15:22 standard required to even compete in the world championships in Doha this year – let alone the necessity to be among the fastest in her home country of South Africa to make their Olympic team.
It’s not like Semenya has been running unheard of times either. She doesn’t even have the 800m world record. Her best time across the distance is 1:54.25, good enough for a national record to be fair, but still about a second off of the world record of 1:53.28 set by Jarmila Kratochvílová of West Germany in 1983. Less than a second might seem like not much of a time difference, but across 800m it’s actually a lot. The event is basically a sprint for two laps on a track, and it requires an immense amount of raw speed to become elite. It would be challenging for someone off the street to run one lap, or even half of a lap, at the pace of the world record. Semenya is close to the world record, but it’s not like she’s demolished it, or even run times that put her races into question.
Essentially, Semenya is just a really good racer. Of course she’s still really fast, but her wins boil down to an ability to strategize and kick (close races faster than they’re started) her way into victory. Nobody’s ever questioned Mo Farah or Eliud Kipchoge’s or Steve Prefontaine’s legitimacy as athletes because of how often they win. In fact, they’re celebrated for it. Kipchoge had two time-trials specifically tailored to him so that he could break the two hour barrier in the marathon. Nobody has ever questioned whether he has an unfair natural advantage just because he’s won 10 out of his 11 career marathons. Nobody claims that his legs are longer than everybody else’s, or that his lung capacity is too naturally large. He’s simply regarded as one of the most dominant athletes of all time, and other athletes just have to find a way to reach his level. And the thing about kipchoge is that he does have the record in the marathon – and when he broke it, it was by over a minute. Still nobody told him that he can’t run alongside his fellow elite athletes in international competition. Because of his dominance, the distance running community has effectively celebrated him into a league of his own.
The IAAF is taking Semenya’s natural talent and asking her to reduce it to make it a closer race between her and the rest of the middle distance field, but she hasn’t done anything so out of this world as to warrant that. They’re essentially asking her to hinder herself to tighten competition, when we celebrate male athletes who dominate their fields just as much as she hers. They’re asking her to compete on an oversized piano because her fingers are too big – to play with earplugs in because she has perfect pitch.
Some might come at this from the angle of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) and wonder why she’s allowed to compete with heightened testosterone levels when other athletes aren’t allowed to take hormones to bring themselves up to her level. But athletics doesn’t discriminate based on an athlete’s natural build. It only discriminates when an athlete changes their physique using unnatural methods. Semenya was born the way she is now, and doesn’t take hormones to improve her performance. It’s also worth noting that Semenya isn’t transitioning, either. She was legally born female with some male characteristics which never fully developed. Legally, she’s a woman – just one who happens to have a heightened level of testosterone.
The IAAF is actively trying to hinder Semenya from being dominant across her preferred distance. She showed up to the music competition and the judges told her her fingers are too long. They said she has to either play on an oversized piano or pick an entirely new instrument. And if she can’t get them to change their minds, she won’t be able to defend her title of Olympic Champion.