We go back to the beginnings of women’s inclusion in elite sports. It turns out that men had an odd variety of concerns about women athletes. Some doubted these athletes were even women at all. And that skepticism resulted in the first sex testing policies.
LISTEN
VOICES
- Celestine Karoney, BBC Africa reporter
- Michael Waters, author of The Other Olympians
- Jörg Krieger, author of Power and Politics in World Athletics
- Lindsay Pieper, author of Sex Testing
TRANSCRIPT
Rose Eveleth: Let’s begin in the summer of 1928. Almost 100 years ago now. That August, the Olympics was held in Amsterdam, and almost every day the Olympic stadium was packed with fans.
And those fans were watching something historic. This was the first Olympics where women were allowed to compete in track and field.
Women had been allowed in the Olympics before 1928. They could play tennis, or swim — sports that were considered delicate and feminine. But track and field had always been completely off limits.
And on August 2nd, a particularly exciting race happened. The 800m — two laps, half a mile. This was the longest distance women were allowed to run.
There is some silent footage from the race that still survives, and as the camera pans across the crowd, you can see fans cheering, waving hats, and leaning over the railings to get a better look.
The gun goes off, and the women round the first bend as a pack, looking strong. Over the two laps around the track, the group mostly stays together. But coming out of the final bend, Linda Radke from Germany pulls ahead, and manages to outkick her competitors and come away with the gold.1
This race was, by modern track and field metrics, an incredible success. The first three women came across the line in world-record-breaking times. But it wasn’t the multiple world records that made an impression on newspaper reporters and sports officials. It was the fact that the women looked tired after doing it.
A few of the women put their arms over their heads, or on their knees. One falls to the ground, and gets back up with some help. If you’ve ever watched a race on a track, it’s all fairly normal stuff. But that is NOT how the newspapers reported it:
Voice actor 1: “The 800 metres race yesterday for women was a disgrace.”2
Voice actor 2: “The first five women crossing the finishing line collapsed…”3
Voice actor 3: “They burst into tears…”4
Voice actor 2: “…falling onto the grass unconscious.”
Voice actor 3: “…a very feminine trait!”
Voice actor 4: “Even this distance makes too great a call on feminine strength.”5
Rose Eveleth: It seems as though these reporters were seeing what they expected to see: evidence of all the fears they already had about women competing in sports. It was too taxing, too grueling, too manly.6
In the wake of this race, sports officials considered banning all athletics for women. (Athletics being the term most of the world uses for track and field.) But eventually, they decided that that was perhaps a bit much. So they simply banned the 800.7 Women were not allowed to run the half mile at the Olympics again until 1960.8
The history of women’s sports is full of men doubting women’s sports. But it’s more than just being skeptical of women as athletes, or the marketability of women’s sports, or even whether sports might damage women’s health. From the very beginning of women’s inclusion in the Olympics, the men in charge doubted that they were even women at all.
From CBC and NPR’s Embedded, this is TESTED. I’m Rose Eveleth.
Rose Eveleth: After winning an Olympic silver medal in Tokyo in the summer of 2021,9 Christine Mboma went on an absolute tear in the 200m. She won in Nairobi.
World Athletics Announcer: [starting gun fires] Ofili is giving them a run for their money, but it is Mboma pulling away…
Rose Eveleth: Brussels.
NBC Announcer: Mboma will take the win…
Rose Eveleth: Zurich.
Diamond League Announcer: Mboma is charging! Mboma is coming very, very quickly! And she just gets it on the line…
Rose Eveleth: Christine ended the 2021 season with ten 200m wins.
World Athletics Announcer: Mboma for the victory, Mboma!
Rose Eveleth: But with every victory, came a hint of something else.
At that time, the rules for athletes with differences of sex development, or DSDs, said that they couldn’t race the middle distances — 400, 800 and the mile. Christine had planned to run the 400 in Tokyo. It was her primary race.
But a few weeks before the games — after those tests we told you about — she learned she was now considered a DSD athlete. Which meant she wasn’t allowed to run the 4 in Tokyo. So she dropped out and enrolled in the 2.
Doing so essentially meant outing herself as a DSD athlete — because anybody who was paying attention to track knew that there was really only one reason she would drop out of the 400.
And so suddenly Christine went from an amazing runner, to an amazing runner… with an asterisk.
Celestine Karoney: A lot of people felt, oh, well, that explains her.
Rose Eveleth: This is Celestine Karoney, the BBC Africa reporter.
Celestine Karoney: It’s the wording in the narrative of how we tell her story as well. If then she becomes this athlete that, every time we speak about her, we speak about, “Well, you see, she’s still fast despite….”
Rose Eveleth: Sometimes, the announcers calling these races would explicitly note Christine’s status as a DSD athlete.
Diamond League Announcer: We’re going to see Christina Mboma from Namibia. One of the DSD athletes who had to change events…
Rose Eveleth: In the comments under videos of her races, you see some people saying things like “Mboma is a man.” And “Christine… is one lucky dude.” Now that they knew that Christine had high testosterone, these people credited her entire success to it — not her training, or mentality, or dedication, but her hormones.
Christine’s fastest 200 meter time is 21.78 seconds. Which, despite what these commenters online might say, isn’t even close to the men’s times. In fact, she would still lose to the fastest high school boys in the United States.
And yet, watching these races in 2021, there was this pervasive sense that Christine was on borrowed time. The announcers at the race in Zurich, even say so out loud:
Diamond League Announcer: But if Mboma continues like this, there’s a lot of questions as to what World Athletics will do going forward. Now that Mboma, for instance, is running the lesser distances.
Rose Eveleth: One online commenter said that the organization governing track and field shouldn’t allow “this charade to continue too much longer.”10
Christine told me that the only thing she could do was try her best, and try to ignore all the people online telling her that she was too fast to be a girl. Too good. That she had to secretly be a man.
And it turns out, that idea, that elite women are actually secretly men, goes all the way back to the very beginning of women’s competition in sports.
When I started researching the history of gender verification policies over ten years ago, one of the first, and most surprising things I learned was that sex testing policies are not new.
In 1928, in the Olympics I was just telling you about, people immediately started pointing fingers at athletes and accusing them of being too manly.
Voice actor: “She had all the power of a halfback.”11
Rose Eveleth: That’s how newspapers wrote about Hitomi Kinue, the woman who won silver in that 800m race. Another reporter said Hitomi was taken aside and examined to make sure she was actually a woman.12
A few years later, the American Helen Stephens was hit with the same accusations.
Voice actor: “Polish Scribe Doubts Helen Stephens’ sex: Claims she runs too fast to be normal woman.”13
Rose Eveleth: In response to these accusations, American officials put out a statement saying that they had indeed verified that Helen was a woman.14
That same year, 1936, the governing body of track and field created the first official policy on the books to allow for examination of suspicious women.
And for years I’ve wanted to understand… why? Why did these sports officials decide it was necessary to confirm a woman’s sex in the first place? What were they so worried about? What were they trying to achieve?
Rose: Okay, so we are walking into the Olympic… campus, I would say?
Rose Eveleth: To try and answer that question, producer Ozzy Llinas Goodman and I went to Switzerland, to the Olympic Studies Centre in Lausanne.15
Rose: Okay… what does this sign say?
Rose Eveleth: The grounds are meticulously maintained, and covered in statues, mostly of men.
Rose: Uh, a naked, a naked man, a naked, muscular man.
Rose Eveleth: But there are a few women….
Rose: Oh, there’s a lady holding the Olympic rings, very prominent nipples. Yes. The Olympic Study Center. Your source for Olympic knowledge — oh, here we are!
Rose Eveleth: The Olympic Studies Center houses over a million pages of archival documents going all the way back to the very beginning of the modern Olympics in 1894.
We spent a week there, in a cozy, and extremely quiet, little room looking out onto Lake Geneva, going through thousands of pages of old meeting minutes and correspondences. Folders and folders and folders of delicate, sometimes 100-year-old paper, all organized into sometimes confusingly labeled boxes.
Rose: Am I doing this wrong? This is page… and this is…. Oh, no. It’s box number 99, not page number 99. Here we go. I’m going to figure this out eventually.
Rose Eveleth: Leafing through these folders, we found a whole lot of procedural discussions within the International Olympic Committee, peppered with back-slapping. Language like: “We are very glad and satisfied with the work which has been done here. People with good will have assembled from all parts of the world to carry out a noble ideal.”
You also get a sense of this tight-knit group that made up the IOC over the years.
Rose: Some of this is people being invited to Eduardo Hay’s birthday party and saying they can’t come.16
Rose Eveleth: And from the very beginning, these committee members had a few key things in common. They were all men. (The first woman wouldn’t be appointed to the IOC until 1981.)17 And they all had money. And not just, like, regular money. Old money.
Michael Waters: I mean, there are kings who are members of the IOC. There are princes who are members of the IOC. And then there are just kind of like, titled nobility, often with wealth going back centuries.18
Rose Eveleth: This is Michael Waters, author of a recent book called The Other Olympians. He went to the archives, too, with a similar mission: to try and find explanations for why sports officials were so adamant that they had to check the sex of female athletes. And… he never found any. Neither did Ozzy and I.
Ozzy: But I checked, like all the other correspondence files where it might be, and it wasn’t in there.
Rose: Yeah… I’m looking to see if…
Rose Eveleth: When they do talk about sex testing, they do so vaguely. The main thing we found from these early days that directly references these women, is a letter from 1936 from a man named Avery Brundage. He was the president of the American Olympic Committee.19
The letter referenced “female (?) athletes” — and Brundage wrote that he felt compelled to pass along a correspondence he’d received — in which an observer described a woman’s appearance, called her a “border-line case” and went on to say, “[R]ules should be made to keep the competitive games for normal feminine girls and not monstrosities.”
Other than that… mentions of sex testing in the archive from this era are sparse. Here’s Michael Waters again.
Michael Waters: I mean, it’s kind of a wild experience where you’re going through this, like, folder after folder of just dozens and dozens of letters arguing about the rules around like, how much an athlete could get paid as a travel stipend. But then when it comes to this policy around sex testing that we’re really living with today, it’s really just a few letters back and forth. I mean, there just wasn’t very much thought at all into it.
Rose Eveleth: But after talking to a bunch of historians who taught me how to read between the lines of these documents, I can say that the men in charge of sports seemed to be concerned about three different things.
The first was straight up cheaters. Men dressing up as women and sneaking into women’s sports to win medals. The second was this idea that women who did sports might actually turn into men. Which was a thing they really thought could happen.
And the third was the most complicated. This idea that women who were drawn to sport, women who wanted to compete, were actually not really women in the first place.
But I couldn’t find any set of letters or meeting minutes in which they untangle these things, or grapple with the idea that they aren’t all the same. Not in the IOC archives, nor in any of the records I was able to see from track and field history.
The experts I talked to about this, told me that probably that’s because these conversations weren’t happening at official meetings.
Jörg Krieger: You know, they had some very close friendship that revolved around beer drinking. They would meet in a hotel lobby or wherever it would be and would gather, and, and chat.
Rose Eveleth: This is Jörg Krieger, a sports historian and the author of Power and Politics in World Athletics. And in his research he found that these men in the 1930’s literally called these get togethers “the beer drinking society.”
Jörg Krieger: So we can only imagine how they talked about, you know, these women, in those informal settings.
Rose Eveleth: So they didn’t write this stuff down. But there are a few bits of context that can help us all understand their worldview a little bit better.
The first thing to know is that ideas around sex and gender were really different in the early 1900’s. Scientists were just starting to figure out human genetics.20
At the time, the dominant idea around sex was something called “balance theory.” The idea here was that every person is born with a mixture of male and female elements in them. If you have a bit more male stuff, you are a man. If you have a bit more female stuff, you are a woman.
Lindsay Pieper: And this is where the percentages come in that people aren’t 100% one or the other, that we’re seeing people, quote unquote, in the middle.
Rose Eveleth: That’s Lindsay Pieper, a professor at the University of Lynchburg and the author of Sex Testing: Gender Policing in Women’s Sports. What she’s saying is that, in the world of balance theory, someone might be 70 percent woman. Or just 55 percent. Ironically, this is, in some ways, more accurate than the really rigid sex binary we tend to think about today. But anyway…
Back then, if you believed in balance theory, you also believed that this balance can be tipped. That someone who started out as 70% woman, but who exercised like a man, and ran on the track, and competed in sports, could slowly shift, and wind up on the other side of that invisible line, and become a man.
Lindsay Pieper: And so there’s this fear that there’s women who are participating in sport who, you know, aren’t really women. But then also there’s this undercurrent too that sport’s going to masculinize women as well.
Rose Eveleth: So there’s that going on.
It’s also worth remembering when we are in time. Women first competed in track and field in the Olympics in 1928. Just five years later, Hitler was named chancellor of Germany.21 In 1936, the Nazis hosted the Olympics in Berlin.
Narrator: Through these flag-bedecked streets rides Adolf Hitler, host to the worldwide gathering of sports enthusiasts, to open the 1936 Olympiad.22
Rose Eveleth: Some of the men in charge of sports at the time were fans of Nazi ideologies, a particular vision of purity and perfection, and the value of traditional, conservative gender roles.23
So all of these beliefs are kind of colliding when you see men make these oblique references to the problem of women, who are maybe men, or maybe turning into men, in sport. Here’s Michael Waters again.
Michael Waters: Knowing that a lot of the people involved sort of have this fascist belief system, I think lets us see, just like, why that was so confused and so poorly thought through from the start.
Rose Eveleth: Scholars of this period have argued that for sports officials, the point of all this concern, all this talk about fraudulent, incorrect women, wasn’t accuracy, or logic. It was control. In fact, they would later officially call the policies created to address these women, “sex control.”
Here’s Jörg Krieger again.
Jörg Krieger: I think what their position is, we have to form regulations so that those women who are participating come as close to our expectations as we want them to be.
Rose Eveleth: There is one problem for these men. They don’t have proof. They don’t have an athlete who they can point to and say “See! This is what we’re talking about.”
But that was about to change.
☀︎ ☀︎ ☀︎ BREAK ☀︎ ☀︎ ☀︎
Rose Eveleth: In November of 1935, the men of athletics opened up their newspapers and saw a story that gave them an almost perfect example of everything they had been looking for. Evidence that their ideas about women in sports had been right all along.
And that evidence came in the form of a Czechoslovakian athlete named Zdeněk Koubek.
Voice actor: “Woman Track Star Decides to Change Sex: Through a rare phenomenon of nature, Czecho-Slovakian world champion track star, will shortly become a man, and in all probability will retain the two women’s running records she set in London in 1934.”24
Rose Eveleth: The modern women I’m following in this series are not transgender. And these days, track and field has separate policies for trans and DSD athletes. But when you trace these kinds of policies back to the origins, they lead you to Zdeněk Koubek — an athlete who competed, and won, as a woman, and then transitioned.
Michael Waters: Zdeněk Koubek is a Czech athlete who was born in 1913. He was from this poor family. And he spent a lot of his life basically working retail.
Rose Eveleth: As part of his book research, Michael Waters had Koubek’s memoir translated into English. In the memoir, Koubek writes poetically about all kinds of things, including his love of running.
Voice actor playing Koubek: “The greatest reward for the hard life of track and field is, of course, victory. When the announcer names the winner over the megaphone, it is as though someone very dear and close to you gently stroked your cheek.”
Rose Eveleth: In 1934, Koubek was at the peak of his career. By that point he had broken the Czech women’s record in the 800m. Later that year, he’d break the women’s world record in the 800, and win gold at the Women’s World Games.
But instead of being able to celebrate these wins, Koubek was inundated with accusations. In his memoir, he writes about receiving anonymous letters accusing him of being a man in disguise. And about newspaper columnists and other athletes who would make comments about his physique — here, referring to himself in the third person:
Voice actor playing Koubek: “It was said in jest that she wasn’t a girl, but a boy with the devil in her body.”
Rose Eveleth: And he even talks of being stopped at a border crossing:
Voice actor playing Koubek: “At passport control, an inspector was taken aback by Zdeňka’s masculine appearance.”
Rose Eveleth: Koubek returned from the 1934 Women’s World Games a national hero of women’s athletics. But privately, Koubek had been struggling for years with his gender. Once the 1934 season ended, he began quietly contacting lawyers and doctors in his home country, and started the process of transitioning.
Which brings us back to November of 1935, when the story broke in Prague newspapers, announcing Zdeněk Koubek’s name and gender change.
Voice actor: “Czecho-Slovakian world champion track star will shortly become a man…”
Rose Eveleth: Here, finally, in black-and-white newsprint, was the proof that the men in charge of sports had been seeking. To them, Koubek represented everything that was wrong with women’s sports.25
In response to Koubek’s public transition, many of these men jumped at the chance to weigh in. One of them was a prominent Nazi sports doctor named Wilhelm Knoll. He wrote an op ed in the magazine Sport.
Michael Waters: Accusing Koubek of being a fraud, and insinuating that he in some way had been cheating the whole time.
Rose Eveleth: And Knoll wasn’t alone in his complaints. Here’s Lindsay Pieper again.
Lindsay Pieper: They point to Koubek and say, “See? If you compete in elite sport, look what can happen to you. Sport will turn you into a man.”26
Rose Eveleth: Some people believed that Koubek represented a threat to “real” women on the track. The manager of the Canadian Women’s Olympic team, a woman named Alexandrine Gibb, wrote that it was not fun to watch the games, “when you were there and saw real feminine Canadian girls forced to compete against that sort of a mannish athlete in track and field events.”27
Those real women had to be protected. And so, in August of 1936, a year after Koubek’s public announcement, the governing body of track and field instituted a new policy.28
As far as we know, this was the first ever official rule, on paper, that allowed sports governors to pull aside female athletes and examine them. And the rule went like this — as read by Michael Waters, author of The Other Olympians:
Michael Waters: “If a protest concerns questions of a physical nature, the organization responsible for carrying through the meet shall arrange for a physical inspection made by a medical expert. The athlete must submit to the inspections as well as the decision taking on account thereof.”
Rose: Yeah so… what does that actually mean?
Michael Waters: It really to some extent doesn’t mean anything. It can mean whatever these officials want it to mean. It’s really, “We’ll know it when we see it.” It’s not a 1 to 1 to today, but I do think what Knoll is really doing is creating a script that we’re living out in various forms sort of later in the 20th century and into today.
Rose Eveleth: The organization responsible for this policy, the International Amateur Athletic Federation, is now known as World Athletics. That’s the same organization that passed the most recent regulations that impact Christine Mbomba.
For decades, a series of vague policies like this hung over women’s sports. Sex testing happened in the shadows, mostly on a case by case basis, without any official guidance from sports officials about who, exactly, they were trying to keep out.29
But then, in the 1960s, a new era of sex testing began. It was the Cold War, and tensions were high between the Soviets and the West. The rivalry was playing out in all kinds of places: in space, in research labs, in the press, and… in sports.
And the women of the Eastern Bloc decimated the West. They were bigger, faster, and stronger. Here’s how the New York Times News Service wrote about some of them at the 1964 Olympics:
Voice actor: “A shot and discus double was achieved by Tamara Press, who is big enough to play tackle for the Chicago Bears. At the rate the Bears are going this season, they could probably use her, too.”30
Lindsay Pieper: There had been a lot of ideas swirling around about the appearances of the Soviet athletes. There’s an unfortunate number of quotes where female athletes say something along the lines of, well, just just look at her, there’s no way.
Rose Eveleth: Here’s Sheila Lerwill, a British high jumper, speaking with the British Library for an oral history project.
Sheila Lerwill: We came from an era that had all these big, beefy Russian girls, and they were, oh god they were gross.
British Library interviewer: Did you think these were blokes, or did you think they were on drugs?
Sheila Lerwill: No — drugs? Wouldn’t have known what a drug was! I would have said they were just freaks of nature.
Rose Eveleth: Some of these women were probably doping. Lots of people were, at the time, including Europeans and Americans. And so the big sporting organizations established medical commissions, and gave these commissions two main tasks: figure out what to do about doping, and handle their so-called “sex control.”
Lindsay Pieper: They’re given oversight of both. And you even see some examples where the members don’t really know the difference. They think that some of these doping tests will prevent male imposters.
Rose Eveleth: So you have this surge in suspicion that some athletes aren’t really women. And you also have the establishment of doping tests at competitions, where everybody is potentially being tested for something. So why not throw a little sex testing in there too?
And in 1966, after thirty years of case by case, suspicion based testing, the governing body of track and field rolled out a new policy. Mandatory examinations of all female athletes.31
CBC Reporter: Today, Summer Sound of Sports visits the 8th British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica.
Carol Martin: Everything is so soft and warm and lush. Beautiful.
Rose Eveleth: Carol Martin was 18 when she landed in Jamaica to compete in the 1966 Commonwealth Games. This was her first-ever international competition.
Carol Martin: And I mean, hello, that was that was a little bit of a high. But then again, I didn’t know anything from anything and I was just there having a good time, right.
Rose Eveleth: And she was there to throw the discus.
Carol Martin: Let me tell you, you don’t want to choke when you’re throwing the discus because it won’t go anywhere if you’re tired at all. You have to be loose as a goose, fast as fast as blazes and stronger than, you know, a pit bull.
Rose Eveleth: But before Carol was allowed to throw a single disc, she had to be examined to make sure she was actually a woman.
Carol Martin: I remember we were taken under the stands before the competition into a large room and had to pull my pants down in front of this woman so she could see I had a vagina.
Rose Eveleth: These inspections have come to come to be known as the “nude parades,” or, as some of the athletes called them at the time, “peek and poke tests.”
Carol Martin: I remember thinking, What the fuck is this? And I was a nice person. I never said that at the time, but I remember thinking, Whoa, this seems a little invasive. This seems a little inappropriate. I mean, can’t you see, I’m a girl?
Rose Eveleth: Every single woman who competed in elite athletics in 1966 and 1967 had to undergo this exam.32 Those who refused were not allowed to compete. And to this day, people argue that refusing to show up for a nude parade was an admission of guilt.33 When in fact, we have no idea if the women who didn’t want to be peeked and poked were guilty of anything other than embarrassment.
Nude parades only lasted two years — they were, unsurprisingly, deeply unpopular. Many athletes from the era have since spoken about how humiliating and terrible they were.34
Sporting bodies knew that if they insisted on testing everybody to verify their sex, they would have to come up with another way. Something less invasive, and more reliable. Something objective, ideally, that was beyond reproach or accusations of bias.
And they were in luck, because science was about to deliver something that seemed like salvation.
Coming up: Sports thinks it has found the perfect, scientific test that can tell, once and for all, who was male and who was female.
Debbie Brill: And then we got to carry a card that said I am female.
CREDITS
Rose Eveleth: 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 and archival research by Hillary Dann.
The voice actors you heard in this episode were Loretta Chang, Keith Houston, Amir Nakhjavani, and Em Solarova. Special thanks to Sonja Erikainen, Sharon Kinney Hanson, Elaine Tanner, and Soundworks Recording Studio. Special thanks also to Yeezir. Additional audio from World Athletics and CBC.
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.
- You can watch the race here. ↩︎
- You can read the original newspaper article here. ↩︎
- You can read the original newspaper article here. ↩︎
- You can read the original newspaper article here. ↩︎
- We found this quote in the book Fire on the Track by Roseanne Montillo. ↩︎
- For more on the ways sensationalized media misrepresented the race, see this article. ↩︎
- One American official told a British newspaper in 1928, “‘Anyone who saw the 800 metres women’s race at Amsterdam can easily understand the Federation’s action. … The women runners were absolutely finished, and most of the people who saw the race would not want to see a woman run 800 metres again.’” ↩︎
- For more information, see our timeline. You can watch the women’s 800m race at the 1960 Olympics here. ↩︎
- You can watch the race here. ↩︎
- At the time, World Athletics President Sebastian Coe told the Guardian that Christine’s Olympic 200m performance “vindicated the decision about the 400m.” ↩︎
- You can read the original newspaper article here. ↩︎
- See this article. ↩︎
- You can read the original newspaper article here. ↩︎
- See this article (continued here). For more on Helen Stephens, see The Life of Helen Stephens by Sharon Kinney Hanson. ↩︎
- For more information, see the Olympic Studies Centre website. ↩︎
- Eduardo Hay was a member of the IOC medical commission starting in 1967. ↩︎
- For more information, see the IOC website. ↩︎
- This remains true of many IOC members today. ↩︎
- For more information on Avery Brundage and his place in Olympic history, see this article. ↩︎
- For more information, see our timeline. ↩︎
- It’s worth noting that Hitler took power after winning a plurality of the vote in a democratic election. ↩︎
- This footage comes from the Prelinger Archive. ↩︎
- For more information, see Michael’s book. ↩︎
- You can read the original newspaper article here. ↩︎
- Another athlete who transitioned around this time, Mark Weston, experienced similar media attention. For more information about Koubek’s story, see Michael’s book and Testing sex and gender in sports by Vanessa Heggie. For more on the contested history of sex testing stories from this era, see Rose’s CBC article about Heinrich Ratjen. ↩︎
- For one example of how this belief could operate, see this 1928 article, in which a medical doctor wrote, “One of the problems associated with athletics for women that has given great concern to the experts who have studied the subject is the tendency of these women toward greater masculinity. … It is the belief of the authorities that physical training and athletics should not accentuate masculine qualities.” ↩︎
- You can read the original newspaper article here. ↩︎
- Contemporary reporting explicitly linked Koubek and Weston’s stories to the new policy. ↩︎
- For one story of sex testing from this time period, see this article about Foekje Dillema. ↩︎
- You can read the original newspaper article here. ↩︎
- For more about sex testing policy from the early 1900s through the Cold War, see Jörg’s book, Lindsay’s book, and Gender Verification and the Making of the Female Body in Sport by Sonja Erikainen. ↩︎
- Based on firsthand accounts, this form of testing was used at the 1966 Commonwealth Games, the 1966 European Athletics Championships, the 1966 Asian Games, and the 1967 Pan American Games. ↩︎
- Rumors that failing to show up for a nude parade meant that an athlete had something to hide plagued Iolanda Balas, Tatyana Shchelkanova, Maria Itkina, Maria Vittoria Trio, Irina and Tamara Press, and Mona Sulaiman. ↩︎
- For more information, see these three articles. ↩︎