Men don’t belong in women’s sport

Sharron Davies

Olympic leaders say there’s no such thing as male advantage in sport. Here’s a simple question for them: if that were true, why not just scrap sex-based categories of men and women altogether?

We all know why. Men run faster, jump higher and are stronger than women. In my sport of swimming, men are on average 11 per cent quicker than women. In boxing, their punches are 160 per cent more powerful. Such advantages mean that, on gender transition, mediocre male athletes are rocketing up the rankings, winning prizes and taking women’s places for one simple reason: whatever their feelings and life choices, they are biologically male.

So, faster, higher, stronger – but not better. Different. Human biology dictates it. In sport, sex matters. It’s binary and it governs safety and fair play. Inclusion makes a mockery of sport but it harms just one group: female athletes.

At the heart of a furious debate in which female rights, science and the nature of sport have been shoved aside, trans activists have had the ear of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), whose members insist that there is no evidence to suggest males identifying as trans women have an unfair advantage. That’s simply untrue. The IOC is also ignoring the 18 peer-reviewed studies which contain plenty of evidence to show that the vast majority of male advantages cannot be reversed through transition, or even mitigated to anything remotely close to fair play.

Inclusion makes a mockery of sport but it harms just one group: female athletes

These irreversible male advantages include height, muscle by weight, larger heart and lung capacity, higher metabolic rates, stronger ligaments and less risk of injury. Longer arms give a greater reach and can generate more speed on a cricket ball. Bigger hand spans can more easily palm a basketball. Longer legs and narrower pelvises lead to better running gaits. Males need fewer strides to cross a distance and the strides they take are more efficient. Females have a significantly higher Q-angle of the knee and hip joint internal rotation angle, as well as a significantly lower arch height index in their feet than males. This means that women are much more susceptible to lower limb and foot/ankle injuries.

The results of all that are stark. If you take the top 15-year-old boys in just the United States in a wide range of swimming and track and field events and overlay the best eight results over the top eight outstanding women in Olympic finals in 2016, only a handful of women make a final and none gets a medal of any colour. Because they’re boys, they have male hormones and developmental pathways that girls never have unless cheating is at play.

Which takes us to another huge chunk of evidence the IOC has been ignoring. I swam at a time of East German doping and in my sport the GDR women were systematically doped with testosterone from around the time of puberty. Scientists worked out in the 1960s that if they gave girls a touch of what boys got, they were guaranteed gold and most of the other prizes too.

Olympic, World and European sports results of the 1970s and 1980s were awash with injustice and the crime was confessed to as early as 1990. Yet the IOC has done nothing to address the biggest heist in sport. East German athletes have received compensation in Germany for the harm caused to them, but there has been no justice for all the women from other countries denied their rightful rewards.

At the Moscow Olympics, I finished second to Petra Schneider, who later admitted to having been doped. I have teammates and friends like Ann Osgerby, who came fourth behind three doped East Germans. No one has heard her name or the names of generations of others who excelled in Olympic, World and European championships but were rolled over by GDR cheating. In Europe, more than 90 per cent of all women’s medals in the pool between 1974 and 1989 went to swimmers who were given male steroids around the time of puberty.

But they were, of course, female. Imagine having to face and race opponents who have had the full male-steroid boost from the womb to their twenties before they self-identify their way into women’s competition.

I knew what it would mean from the moment I realised what the IOC had done all those years ago. This was the same organisation that had placed the heads of GDR doping on their advisory panels and had failed to act when it discovered that this doping had been run from an IOC-accredited laboratory. It was the same organisation that had ignored our pleas for justice for more than 30 years.

Rugby, swimming and athletics have led the way back to safety and fair play with rules that ring-fence the women’s category for females only. Sports like cycling are lagging woefully and harming female riders by forcing them to face male advantage in almost every event.

Like the suffragettes, today’s female athletes have been forced to conclude that the only way to halt a march on their rights is to openly object. They are starting to realise that there is immense power in working together to say, ‘Male advantage is real – we are entitled to a female-only category in sport.’ Some cyclists have staged protest rides wearing T-shirts with ‘WOMAN’ on them and posting results under an event category of ‘Woman Means Adult Human Female’. Similar things have been seen in Park Runs up and down Britain. This week half of England’s angler squad quit after a biological male was allowed on the team.

It is a response that sports authorities and event organisers can expect to keep growing until we get back to fair play. Ten British rowing women’s masters records are now in the hands of male athletes identifying as women. That’s not merely unfair – it’s cheating by another name. Women’s sport is not a colony for mediocre males.

Unfair Play: The Battle For Women’s Sport by Sharron Davies and Craig Lord is published on June 22.