Caster Semenya

It's getting a bit weird in sport.
The other night I saw the last 15 balls of the final of the Canadian T20 from which Andre Russell scored most of the 50 runs to take it into a 'super over', in which he finally got out before having to bowl at the opposition. I am old enough to remember the early days of limited overs cricket and a commentary that said,
And with the required run rate now approaching 5 an over, I really can't see them getting these runs now.

A little while before I was born, Ray Booty was the first cyclist to do 100 miles in under 4 hours. And now Marcin Bialoblocki has done 3.13. Mr. Booty would have been surprised, if not a little crestfallen, to get caught by someone who had started 45 minutes after him.
Such things are progress but one eventually lives long enough for it not to be the same game.

Running is roughly the same game but the 4 minute mile is nothing special these days. But it has gone beyond other sports in expecting the oustanding athlete to take drugs to slow them down which is the opposite of what they usually want, which is to stop athletes taking drugs to make them go faster.
Caster Semenya is not a bloke. She benefits from a naturally occuring advantage, which is what all champions do. Something about them makes them better than the other competitors. I know because I've had other bike riders sail past me, faced bowling that either span too much or arrived too soon for me to hit and been out-thought by players who moved their pieces round the chess board better than I moved mine. None of them were champions but they were better than me. Nearly everybody reaches a level at which they are no longer competitive. You get used to it. Having gone to the Gloucestershire athletics trials for under-16's, having won the 800 metres in Gloucester, it was all I could do to stay in the race. 5th of 8, I think I was. That's that, then. Several could run faster than me, for whatever reason.

There are disgruntled complaints in the Paralympics when somebody wins by half the track that they should have been in the next category of disablement. In that case, why can't I have a gold medal for everything in the category of everybody who is exactly like me. I'm afraid we can't all be champions and the idea of it is that there is only one.

There is no suggestion, yet, that Caster Semenya is cheating. She is what she is and one of those things is female. Will they increase the dose until she can't win any more or ask her to carry extra weight, like a horse. It is hard luck for those who don't have her testosterone levels but it was just as hard luck for a horse called Excelebration, who ran up a long sequence of second places and must have the sight of Frankel's back end going further ahead of him etched forever on his memory. If he hadn't been born in the same year as Frankel, he'd have been best of his generation.