Off Air... with Jane and Fi - Fingers in the cream (with Sharron Davies)

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

It's a sporty special today: Jane laments her full time job getting in the way of her golf progress, Fi has an apology to make about netball and they're joined by Olympian Sharron Davies who's talking about her new book, Unfair Play.And our Museum of Taxidermy is now closed, but not before Jane and Fi speak to the creator of 'Stoned Fox'Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfiIf you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail].  Assistant Producer: Megan McElroyTimes Radio Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Right, shall we wait until you've finished? What are you going... Oh, no, not with your fingers in the cream. Sorry. No, not fingers in the cream. I've got to shave up. It is so... No, so we had a feature today with Hannah Evans,

who's the Deputy Food Editor at The Times. And she brought us in some amazing pastries from artisan bakeries. And you've had, what was it, a brioche with cream in? Brioche with whipped cream and sugar. But you know what it reminds me of? My paternal grandmother's baking. It's absolutely delicious. That was a lovely little throwback, that, actually.

So you've just left the cream. I just can't, I can't justify having all that cream with nothing. If I had a spoon, obviously I would. I've got my emergency spoon in my handbag. To be honest, I think just if you're on your own, you would. Of course. So thank you for all of your wonderful emails about taxidermy. The Off-Air Museum of Taxidermy has closed now. That is because we've had to offer counselling to quite a few of the producers who've been working on the podcast this week.

But I think it's been one of the best listener interaction things I've ever seen. And I really, really want to thank whoever it was who sent in what's been termed on the Instagram as either bat with tackle or flasher bat yeah horrible which is a bat holding its wings open displaying his manhood and it is his manhood well it's his bat hood isn't it with just an incredible arrogant expression on his face uh so that's made my week but we we do need you to stop. Please stop. Please stop.

Okay, but if you haven't seen any of the images, go to the Instagram, Jane and Fee, where we're building up a nice little collection of community-minded, slightly dizzy folk who enjoy the content there. So there's some serious stuff, or relatively serious, but on the whole, it's just a place of good cheer and companionship so if you're in the mood for that head to our insta jane and fee is what you need so shall we start off by playing our little interview with adele and then we'll do some emails and then we'll get to our big guest this afternoon it is big guest uh sharon davis uh joined us to talk about her latest book but we did get an email yesterday didn't't we, from Adele, who is?

Well, she is the artist. And she's actually very serious about her work. Why shouldn't she be? She's the artist behind what is now a viral stuffed fox, stoned fox. Stoned fox has been a meme, was particularly big in Russia. And I have to say, by fluke, Adele was already listening to the podcast. Is that right?

How weird. It is a bit weird. It's a bit, I mean, we never know who's listening, obviously, but our tentacles do extend to some fairly extraordinary places. Anyway, Adele got in touch, emailed us, and we talked to her earlier. She was on her lunch break, and she told us that her you know this is one of her early works the stone fox do google stone fox so you're absolutely in the picture of you know you've actually seen it but you can also see it on our insta i should have

mentioned that earlier let me do this bit again no i just keep going i just absolutely plow on we spoke to adele earlier and she told us how an early attempt at some poor taxidermy took her to a Fatboy Slim concert and on a Russian press tour. So where did her interest begin? Yeah, it's funny because you mentioned going, you know, to these museums as a child and being horrified by it but for me it had the exact opposite uh kind of effect because that's how I got into taxidermy is when I was a kid I used to go to Cardiff Museum because I'm Welsh originally and the same kind of thing like you are kind of at eye height with all these creatures and you know there's like a very badly

stuffed tiger and a lion and it was the first time you could get that close to any of those animals I mean they are dead but and then when I was 15 I went to one of these days out in the local nature reserve where they have a tent set up with showing all the local wildlife and they had taxidermy and I asked the guy there oh where you know where did you get this and he said oh one of my friends they had taxidermy and I asked the guy there oh where you know where did you get this and he said oh one of my friends is a taxidermist and that's the first time I realized it was a job um and he did say something like women don't really do the job so I thought okay so I should definitely do the job um and yeah sort of started from there so then I was about 16 when that happened and then I started researching it on dial-up internet

and then got a book, which is very old. That's like black and white photos. It's horrible. And then when I was 18, I did my first mouse. So starting small. Are you, Adele, are you offended by the fact that your fox, your very early fox, we should say, has become a figure of fun? Oh, no, not at all.

No, I laughed out loud when I listened to yesterday's podcast at the beginning where one one of you said oh because I'd said that it was eight years in that I'd made him and one of you said I dread to think the other eight years eight years and I laughed out loud because it's true it's you know no no no I genuinely I'm not even one percent offended by it I mean it was I loved it I loved our correspondent who said it looks like uh the kind of fox that only a mother could love. Yeah. You know, after I first made him, I didn't show him, like I didn't take photographs of him or anything. I just thought, oh, OK, this was not the best.

This is just one of those things where everything started to go wrong you know and then when he dried like that even though I there's something about him I just thought oh I've done something bad here this is not what a fox is supposed to look like um here's your most famous uh work yeah which is ironic well it is because i i dare say that you've done you've gone on to splendid uh examples of taxidermy since where is he now he's actually in my house now he was gone because i sold him originally this is how all the crazy stories started um and then he was gone for 12 years and then i had to buy him back at a very inflated rate so I had to raise money to buy him back which I did two years ago I think it was or three years ago where where had he gone

who'd bought him and and how unfair that they charged you more than presumably they paid for him in the first place I know and he was a wreck as well. But so it's all started kind of strange. So I made him when I was in the second year of my master's in fine art. But taxidermy at the time I was keeping as a complete secret. I wasn't telling anyone I was doing it. And then one day I decided to do this fox and everything started going wrong with him. and everything started going wrong with him and then I decided to show for the first time the taxidermy work in like a crit where everyone criticizes each other's work and for some reason that day all of the class were out apart from two of us and both of those people said don't show this fox to anyone what have you done so it's like okay take note so for two years he was just in my studio

I didn't show anyone I didn't take a photo and then I was going to the jungle to look for a new species of ape which is a whole other story and I needed uh inoculations you know vaccinations to go to this remote part of the jungle very expensive needed to raise money so I put him on eBay. Now at the time I didn't have a website or anything. So I hadn't put him on my website or on social, I didn't have any social media. So from eBay, he went viral, but I didn't know because I didn't have any social media and nobody knew who I was because my eBay name is like something I made when I was 14, you know? was because my eBay name is like something I made when I was 14 you know and then I started getting these very strange messages saying from Russia on eBay which I thought was a scam but it wasn't

saying he'd been made into a meme but I didn't know what a meme was because this was 2011 which memes were not a thing um and then I thought it was a scam so then the guy sent 100 links to all these Russian websites um and then eventually a man called Mike bought the fox off me um and then I later discovered that Mike had seen a post from a famous DJ who had said, I love this fox. If someone buys it for me, I'll play a gig for them for free. So Mike saw this as a money-making opportunity where he could have this famous DJ come and DJ for free and he could sell tickets. So he bought the fox. He asked to meet me in person, which is a bit odd when you're selling something on ebay and then i met him he did the gig that was very surreal uh the fox was there and then then people from russia contacted me said this is blown up in russia will you come here

but i no longer own the fox at this point so now now I have to ask Mike, can I borrow the fox back to go to Russia? But Mike is a very interesting guy. If you were submitting this as a plot for a movie, Adele, I think someone would say, could you go and workshop that a bit? Because that's an incredible story. But look, it's fantastic that you did get him back in the end how much did you pay uh over a thousand to get him back unfortunately when you look at him adele does he have a personality does he have a name no he's the only one that i have never named

because everyone sort of the russian press called him stoned Fox. So that's just kind of stuck. But yeah, I felt like he's like the original. So I usually call him the OG Fox, but he doesn't have a name. He looks like a Barry to me. That's a great name, actually. Well, that's the artist known as Adele, whose life story I very strongly suspect would be worth hearing. I mean, that's just a very brief, just a tiny insert of what Adele's been up to over the years. So there's something about the Fox, isn't there?

One of our all time favourite family films was the fantastic Mr Fox, which is a Wes Anderson movie, isn't it? Park kind of animation. Oh, I really, really loved it. Did you? Yeah, I did, actually. Do you know, you've just reminded me, driving back home last night in the dark, I mean, it was about 10, I think,

and my daughter and I saw a fox standing on top of a parked car. Now, we often see foxes round our neck of the woods last thing at night, but the fact that it was just standing on top of a car without a care in the world. And it is weird how otherworldly a fox appears. There's just something a little bit frightening about them. I mean, they make you jump. You try to take a photo and they dash out of shot and they're hopeless. But they just don't.

I don't know. They are unnerving as critters i think yes i think they're one of the easiest animals to anthropomorphize aren't they which is why you know that's happened so many times yeah so ours just come out in the day now because there's definitely a fox den over the other side of the fence and obviously you know we've got quite a lot of animals in the petting zoo. Well, indeed. And so when they don't finish their food, and I'll tell you what, Brian is quite a finisher. But guess what? Babra Kadabra, not so much. She'll offer food.

So the foxes tend to come over the wall to eat the food. And in that nanosecond, I always think, oh, how lovely to see you. And then I think, no, go away because I know what happens next. You just pee all over the food. You do a great big smelly poo and you're upsetting me so there we go let's say hello to Kate who's emailed in about traveling when my husband and I retired early 23 years ago we had a bucket list of places we really wanted to see and And very fortunately, we have done them all, except the Grand Canyon, which we're off to see next month with Saga. It's much delayed from a pre-COVID booking, says Kate.

We're now 84 and 77. We look forward to it with some trepidation, but I did get to holiday in Singapore and Australia this year as a 50th birthday treat for our youngest daughter, who lives in Alice Springs and didn't find the travelling too exhausting. I still want to go to Japan and Uzbekistan

before it's ruined like Dubai, so I hope my health holds up. Kate, I hope your health holds up. And Kate is one of those people who hasn't lost her love of travelling. She is still really up for it. Okay, this one comes from a person who wishes to remain anonymous. I don't know if you're done with this topic, but my worst ever family holiday came when I booked a trip to Portugal

with my two teenage sons and now ex-husband. I booked two rooms in a gorgeous hotel, which both contained bathrooms made of glass. Things were already going badly with me desperately trying to get everyone interested in exploring the local area when all the boys and my husband wanted to do was stare at their phones. On day two, I hired a man to drive us around

to see the sights I'd lovingly researched, and this included a trip to a highly rated seafood restaurant. We know what's coming, don't we? We had a lovely meal. On the way back, I started to feel a bit odd and by 4pm had full-blown catastrophic food poisoning, followed by my husband and my eldest son. You have not known marital discord

until you have two people experiencing seafood poisoning in one small hotel room with a glass bathroom. It lasted four days. The only person who enjoyed the trip was my youngest, who'd ordered a burger at the restaurant and got to spend those four days playing computer games in the room whilst ordering room service. Now, I really love that,

because I bet when he ordered the burger at the restaurant, you went, oh, for goodness sake, will you not just try the local squid? Be adventurous. Look at the long-goose team. You could have a burger anywhere. No, that muscle doesn't smell strange. You've come all this way.

You're just eating a burger. Well, who had the last laugh there? I love that idea about a glass bathroom. Because when you walk into a hotel room, and you know sometimes the bathroom's not even very separate from the bedroom anymore, Jane. And I i think it doesn't matter how much i love the person that i'm in the hotel room with i don't want that to happen in public i mean i think probably most of us can look back to incidents of that nature i i can't eat i can't eat beef wellington after a similar sounding event

yeah i know i don't think it would i think what happened was that we both caught a bug I can't eat beef wellington after a similar sounding event. Really? Beef wellington? I know. I think what happened was that we'd both caught a bug from somebody else in the family, but we'd happened to have a meal of beef wellington and I'm never, ever eating it again. Can I just say a quick shout out to Pamela? Pamela, I'd love to do justice to the wonderful email you sent us about your late mum. She sounds an amazing lady

and thank you very much indeed for telling us about her um some lovely stories and also some stories about um what we might likely refer to as family discord but um we share your pain and um very much hope that you're okay i should say um that she reports that margot is now a very popular name at our local Diddy Dog daycare. So Margot is not only gaining popularity in the human world, but is very much with us in the canine world as well. Who knew? It is funny how names just become wildly popular. Well, I think Margot in our generation just had different connotations, didn't it?

It was a silly, slightly snobby name, wasn't it? Well, because of The Good Life. We've got Felicity Kendall coming on the show. I wonder whether Felicity might make a comeback as a name. I think it's rather a nice name. Yeah, I would agree. When's she coming on? Why don't I know this? Have I missed a meeting?

No, I don't think you've missed a meeting. It was just a name that was offered by Young Eve a couple of days ago. And I said yes, because I saw her recently. I saw her in a show recently and she was brilliant. Yeah. I always rather wanted to be her. I definitely, definitely wanted her fringe. She's managed to carry a fringe off all the way through her life.

Yeah. I wanted to be Margot. Did you? I wanted to have, what do you call them? I wanted to have Jerry by your side. I through your life. Yeah, I wanted to be Margot. Did you? I wanted to have, what do you call them? I wanted to have Gerry by your side. I wanted a caftan and I wanted Gerry. And to be a bit snooty. And to be, well, I don't have to try too hard to be that.

We've been told off, and rightly so. As I was going home last night, Annabelle, I felt bad about the conversation we'd had about netball too. Not least because I don't think gs stands for goal scorer as i hazarded a guess uh from uh a very very narrow part of my frontal lobe marked sport i think it's goal shoot it's goal shooter isn't it not goal scorer anyway annabelle says this i don't want to complain and please class this more as helpful friendly advice or as teachers used to say in my school reports constructive criticism I am and have been since

I could toddle a sports fanatic thanks to extremely sporty and supportive parents I was able to have a everything including football cricket tennis gymnastics and also netball I played quite a few of the sports mentioned above to a fairly decent competitive level through my teenage and young adult years and I can therefore guarantee you that netball requires as much athleticism, discipline, fitness and coordination as any of the sports I've mentioned in paragraph one. I say this as someone who's not tall and still enjoyed playing netball and still do and I could rant on about how irritating it is to hear the comments regarding the fact that they can't run with the ball as if you actually watch the netball world cup you would have appreciated that they literally

don't stop with the ball and hold it for nanoseconds however I will stop boring you you're not boring us at all but one last and most important point is that as a teenager and young adult netball gave me some of my very best memories from the elation of fantastic wins learning to deal with pressure i am a gold shooter and a netball net doesn't have a blackboard is much smaller and taller than a basketball net horrible fitness regimes long minibus rides to countless i'm yet to counties i'm yet to revisit. And most importantly, netball provides a sisterhood that stretches from incredible volunteers, coaches, umpires, but most importantly, lifelong female friendships. Let's not knock female sport. It

suffers enough already. Good point. Yeah, I'm really, really with you on that, Annabelle. So thank you very much indeed for taking the time to write to us. And I really hear you actually Good point. And I've always been envious, actually, of what they get from it because they turn up, they don't have to chat. There's no booze involved. Nobody's over-emoting or over-sharing or under-sharing or whatever it is. They play sport together and they feel good about themselves and they give each other some high fives and a great big hug and off they go. And they know it's there for the next week too. So I hear you.

And why don't we start a Times Radio Netball Team, Joan? Well, I'm washing my hair. But I do take the point of the email, and I completely agree. I think it's the way men bond, and there must be something in it. I mean, it's not the only way men bond, but a lot of men bond by playing team sport together.

So, it's terrific that women do the same. Good for them. What's happened to your golf? Golf? Well, it's difficult to fit in. I mean, I'd love to. I might go down the driving range and practice my swing again because I was getting quite competent.

But, I mean, seriously, it turned out when they sold me this job, there's a bit more to it than I realised. I thought I'd be playing golf till about five to three. And then I'd... Sweetheart. And then I'd just start talking.

You're not John Inverdale. No, I know. That's exactly... Anyway, it won't mean a lot to many people listening to that comment but I enjoyed it. Right,

I love this email from Claire. Hello Claire. Claire describes herself as another displaced, slightly confused British listener. She's in her 50s

and she says we're keeping our company, well we're all keeping our company as she navigates a new life in Quebec. With my full consent but not too much imagination, she says,

I've gone from happily mooching through life in the UK as a widow, not looking for a romantic adventure, to meeting and marrying my now husband last summer. He moved to Canada 15 years ago and we decided the best plan would be for me to join him here. But it's been a roller coaster so far, with highlights digging the car out of a massive dump of snow melting in 35 degrees of heat this summer and almost crying at the lack of reasonably priced decent cheese and

realizing that my schoolgirl French from the 1980s just isn't really much help here my husband's first language is Spanish so I'm attempting to learn that too I have finally managed to secure my first job here and they'd like me to learn Greek to be able to talk to their suppliers. So there's that as well. Crikey, Claire, you've got a lot going on there. She says, I've learned the hard way that humour is rather different here and sarcasm isn't always well received. I think I'd struggle there. I don't think Canada's calling me, Claire,

but you've obviously found a lovely bloke. So good luck to you there. And I want to know how you met him. He speaks Spanish. He lives in Canada. Where did you meet him? That's what I want to know. I mean, strictly speaking, not my business, but I would still quite like to know. And good luck, because I think moving to a completely different place, I just couldn't, I really think it's an amazing thing to do. me too we could start a little theme of where did you meet because people always have fantastic stories about that yes why where did you meet well I'm just trying to move it on from taxidermy because I think Eve actually needs therapy over the weekend we thought penny farthings was challenging and then Taxidermy was another rogue gall.

So shall we go on to Sharon Davis? Let's. So Sharon Davis was our guest on the programme this afternoon. You would know her as an Olympic silver medalist, a European Championship bronze medalist, a Commonwealth gold medalist, all in the pool. She was a swimming champion at just 13 years old. I think she went

to her first Olympics, didn't she? Which was the 1976 Games when she was in Montreal. Was it Montreal? Yes, when she was just 13. And she's become one of the strongest voices in the campaign for fairness in sport for women to be able to compete on a just playing field, not against athletes competing with an unfair advantage and by that she means drugs like the doping scandals of the east german teams when she was competing or the male hormones and physiques of some trans athletes now and her book is called unfair play the battle for women's sports it's been written with craig lord who is a swimming and olympic journalist and also a writer here Times. Now, the doping of athletes in her discipline of swimming has cost Sharon Davis a

lot. So I asked her how I could have introduced her if drugs hadn't been rife in swimming when she was competing. Oh, that's a great question. You could have called me the youngest European medalist of 14, probably, champion. Olympic double gold medalist, because obviously they took my second event out as well. It's the only time it's been removed. It's been in every single one since then. So I didn't get to swim that, which was really frustrating. And obviously kind of all that era, you know, racing the East Germans. But I've always really passionately felt that there was two victims,

myself and my teammates that lost out on the medals we should have had and all the opportunities, particularly my friends that didn't get on the podium at all. But those young girls that the East Germans let down, you know, many of them are incredibly ill now. Some of them have even died, you know, and it's it's that dereliction to duty that the IOC had and did. And just for 20 years, they ignored it. And then for the 40 years afterwards, they've not acknowledged it. And they're not learning from these terrible lessons. So one of the things that will strike anybody who looks back over your career

is the fact that what happened to you happened in plain sight for all of us as viewers as well. So Jane and I were discussing this the other day. We were talking about the fact that when we watched the 1976 Olympics, know there were jokes in the classroom about the East German team so when you were actually there can you remember what was being said to you at the time about apart from anything else the difference in their appearance but everybody knew you know everybody around the side of the pool knew exactly what was going on.

What we didn't know was what drugs, I mean, we presumed it was testosterone of some sort, but it was tyrannical. So, you know, when they were giving it to these young girls, what was their process? How long did it take before they could get it out of their system so that they could come to the Olympics and, you know, not be tested positive? I mean, so it was all of the how rather than are they, because it was so obvious that they were. You know, they would come to an Olympics, and we'd never seen these people before.

They would appear and break world records, and they've not done a junior programme or any previous internationals of any sort. They looked and sounded like men. They had Adam's apples and, you know, thick throats and shadows and bad skin, And they genuinely looked very sad and not terribly happy. And they were always kept separate from us. I mean, during the 76 Olympic Games, the East German team was kept on a boat in the middle of the St. Lawrence River.

And then after the Games were over, they raked up a load of syringes and tubes and bottles and substances and still nothing was done. You know, there's opportunity after opportunity. There were people that defected with the little blue pills. There was doctors that reported what was going on. It was continual that the IOC did absolutely nothing. They were very complicit in what happened. And they even gave awards to East German doctors and East German coaches, which only until recently were removed. So can you give us a potted history of the IOC with regards to women's sport?

That's your competitive task for today, Sharon. I mean, they just did everything in their power from the word go. So even Pierre de Coubertin, you know, who's supposed to be the father of the Olympic Games, did everything possible to keep being dragged off the Boston marathon. I mean, the book, obviously, people think the book is all about the trans argument. And obviously, that's in there. But it's more about the battles that women have had in sport throughout the whole of the modern history era. And the fact that we've had so many hurdles. I mean, the interesting

statistics are things like, in the UK, at moment, there's a thousand women that earn their living from sport. There's 11,000 men in America because they have better ways of keeping stats than we do. But we're very similar. One percent of the sponsorship dollar goes to women in sport. Four percent of the airtime goes to women. The rest goes to men. So we already have this very tiny piece of the cake. And now we're supposed to be moving over in our own category for males who say that they feel like female however they are still males whatever they feel like they are still males and and this would never be tolerated in men's sport so it's this constant knocking of women's sport this constant battle just to kind of get some form of equality, you know,

even if it's just the opportunity to have the same races or the same number of people, which now we've achieved at the Olympic Games, but it's taken until now literally to do that. And when I competed in 1980, there were four times as many men as there were women. But we still have massive problems with committees and the people that run sport. And I think that's part of the recent problem is that, you know, misogynistic sports like cricket and cycling have been an absolute nightmare to just give a voice to female athletes. Can we talk a bit more about the trans issue then? Is it fair, Sharon, to say that these are people who feel a different sex to the gender that they were assigned at birth? What I have a problem with is

how does feelings like something you're not trump the reality of half the world who are something? And when we know that there's a very different physical ability in sport, i.e. anything between 10% and 30% at the Olympic Games, so 10% being things like middle distance running 30 being something like weightlifting and the more explosive an advantage the bigger the advantage and we have every piece of science that says we can't remove that puberty or that male advantage then basically we've just said to women you're no longer worthy of fair sport

so what we offer men we're not offering women you have to go into a race with a known disadvantage and that's what i have a big problem with this this the fact that for pc virtual signaling women's sport was so easily kicked to the curb again when the ifc could have said well let's do the science first and if the science proves that we can remove advantage then we'll we'll you know think about what we can do and there is a lot yeah and there is a a lot in your book about the science of testosterone so can we just talk about that is it true that even if you reduce the testosterone in a person you would never be able to take away elements gained through being born male through that innate masculinity is that just not possible it's not possible so all of our studies so far and there are 18 19 studies the

last being september of last year one of the largest um after the longest amount of time which is 14 years of reducing testosterone the reduction in the the advantage was tiny. So, you know, that's after 14 years. So things like Q angle, which is the angle between your hips and your knees, which is obviously bigger for women because we have childbearing hips, that's the whole point, means that footballers, for example, have six times as many knee injuries, female footballers, because we have this larger Q angle and because we have ligaments which are much more flexible so therefore they're not as strong and there's no supportive so you know there are those things cannot be altered by reducing testosterone we have 50 trans identifying males at the moment in the english fa and the vast majority of those are goalkeepers because it's a

big advantage to having larger hands and being more dynamic to be able to stop the ball so you know in rugby we know that increases the risk of injury serious injury by about 30 percent and it will be women that will pay the price you know on contact sports so one of the sure so sorry sorry this this will happen because we're doing this on Zoom, Sharon, I apologise for that. Reducing testosterone in an athlete has been touted previously as one way that you might be able to level the playing field. So you're saying that the science doesn't back that up at all? Not a single study supports that. Can I ask you, sorry. All these ideas that it was 10 nanomoles, then it was 5 nanomoles,

then it was 2.5 nanomoles, then it was 5 years, then it was 1 year, then it was none of it. It was all just plucked out of the sky. There was not a single piece of scientific evidence to base that on. Can I also ask you about the gap closing theory, this notion that the more we advance in science, in terms of nutrition, in terms of training, the easier it is to bring male and female athletes together, that the strongest woman might be able to compete with the weakest man. I cannot believe you're asking me that question with a smile on your face. You're literally saying that women don't train hard enough. Is that what you're telling me? No, I am asking you all of the things that you know that you've been challenged about before and all of the main planks that are actually holding up this kind of structure of debate at the moment.

Absolutely. So here. So 40 years ago when I was swimming. All right. We've had 40 years to carry on. I was doing six hours a day, which is what most people are doing today in swimming somewhere between four and six hours a day when I was 11 I fell out of a tree and broke both my arms my dad wrapped my arms in plastic bags and I trained for three months with with my arms in plaster the following year I tore the ligaments in my knee he tied my legs together and I pulled for three months now I can tell you with my hand on my heart there was nobody that trained harder in those training sessions than I did whether you're a male or female however my body does not enable me to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger because I don't produce the testosterone I don't have the framework and it's a very insulting thing to say that female athletes don't train hard enough and with given more time they will close

the gap actually we can prove scientifically that's not true. So the gap has stayed the same pretty much for the last 40, 50 years. The only thing that has actually helped is the access. So when Title IX, for example, in the 70s came in in America, the access for women to have better opportunities and better sponsorship enabled more women and more depths to have access to sport. But the performance difference has practically not changed at all for decades and decades. Our big guest on Off Air is the Olympic swimmer Sharon Davis. I asked Sharon about the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, and why she

thinks they are so fundamentally against women in sport. I just don't know but they always have been you know historically they always have been and You know, historically, they always have been. And the decision they made in 2015 was a decision which literally said we're going to put a feeling in front of all the evidence that we have, all of the women that do our sport, all the idea of offering equality, and we're just going to throw women's sport under the bus. And what we've been doing since then, you know, the past seven, eight years now, we've been clawing it back.

And now you can see the governing bodies changing their policies. There's nothing democratic about the IOC, is there, at all? I mean, as I understand it, is the Princess Royal still Britain's representative? No, sadly not. I wish she was.

I wish she was. She hasn't been our representative for a very long time. So who is it? The only females that sit on that committee come from the middle east and north korea the bastion of women's sport north korea and the middle east and that and that's the problem we have right we don't have strong women are not allowed to sit on those committees who have a voice who stand up for women so we we have a battle and we are

fighting constantly and and things seem to get better and then something like this happens and then we're fighting we're on our back foot and we're fighting again I mean it you couldn't write this stuff sometimes you know when we've made such great strides but like I said having said that we still have a very small piece of the cake and we still got an awful lot of work to do and and you know we look at the football at the moment and it's on television but the moment a major tournament like the Europeans or the Worlds are over then it's a struggle to see it again. How much support have you felt you've had from male athletes during your campaign? I know Daley Thompson has been very vocal in his support and Lord Coe has come good I think quite recently in your eyes but what about other male colleagues? I'm very disappointed to be honest with you I think that

they keep their heads down because they don't want it to affect their revenue so I 2017-2018 over a weekend I contacted 60 of my friends in the world of sport. Every single one of those is an Olympic medalist or a world champion. And every single one of those is a household name. And more than half of them were men. Only five of that 60 have ever put their head above the parapet. And can you tell us just a little bit about the kind of abuse that you have faced? Just activists ringing every single job that I have, ringing every single charity, ringing my children's schools, abusing my kids, calling me every name under the sun. I'm a bigot. I'm a homophobe. I'm what else? Obviously, obviously a transphobe. Oh, I'm even a racist, which I find hilarious because I've got, you know, mixed race kids. So they use these terms not to actually to mean it. They just use it to bully. They use it to shut you up and to stop you

trying to debate and present the science. So why do you think it is, Sharon, that people cannot see the misogyny in the targeting of people like you? I don't know why. I honestly don't know why. I mean, you mentioned Daley. Daley gets a hundredth of the abuse that I get. And yet he has exactly the same views and says the same things. It's almost as though, I mean, people like you. It really does. It feels like it's a totally and utterly a men's rights movement. And historically, women, you know,

we get hit over the head with this be kind slogan. And yet if you turned around to men and said, oh, let's be kind to Lance Armstrong, he was only cheating a little bit. It's not going to matter. He's only got a 1% advantage on us. Let him carry on. I mean, they just laugh in your face.

But there is, it's almost, let's be honest, your side of the argument has somehow become unfashionable it's you are your older women saying apparently unfashionable things and indeed i've had spirited conversations with my own children who happen to be female about what we have faced and what we've lived through and why so many of us get so passionate about this. Now, they don't really see it, do they? I think part of that is age. You know, I mean, my own mum, I remember her telling me that when she bought her first house with my dad,

that the money for the deposit came from my granddad because my mum lost her mum very young. So my granddad gave her the money to buy a house with my dad. Now, my mum's name wasn't even allowed to be on the mortgage yeah on her own house with all the money that she put down you know and I think part of it is the younger generation today just don't see the misogyny and the battle that previous generations have had to get opportunities to get equality to be able to have our own bank accounts and own our own houses and and have a voice. I just don't think they realise what they're giving away. But I've got a 16-year-old and I

do think that there is a change, you know, that the younger, there's a younger generation that are seeing through this as well. And you say it's not fashionable. I'm not sure that's really true because I get phone calls all the time from young athletes and young coaches. It's just that they're petrified to come out and to give their opinion. Do you genuinely, though, see a trans athlete in what you would say is the wrong category as always being a cheat? Though, is that a conflation of two different things that's about deliberate intent maybe it's wrong to to give them that level of kind of uh i don't know illegality menace whatever it is yeah it's difficult isn't it it is difficult because i believe that if you have a known

advantage like that that is knowing that you are cheating. You know, that's the same as someone who's taking testosterone, knows that that testosterone has given them advantage, and going into that race, just like Lance Armstrong, and that's cheating. So, you know, and you can't tell me that Leah Thomas, who was Will Thomas and competed for many years at his university, did not know that he had an advantage when he went into those races. And this is such an interesting time to be talking, isn't it? And recently, Caster Somania has won a case with the European Court of Human Rights, which has said that she was discriminated against within sport

because of being asked to reduce her testosterone levels and i wonder what you think about that kind of interface between sport and uh the legal world because those kind of challenges uh will continue to be made won't they and yes unless we come up with a better framework yeah unless we come up with a better framework yeah unless we come up with a better framework which i would very much like to do that's where i am pushing you know the the the resolution shall i say the answer so i believe we should bring back sex screening which is a cotton wool swab to the inside of your cheek and it takes 10 seconds and you have one in your life because you can't humans can't change your your sex i have one way back in 1976 the irc

got rid of it in around the 2000s they polled their female athletes 98 said they wanted to keep it two percent said they found it uncomfortable now if you find having a cheek swab uncomfortable you shouldn't be an elite sport because elite sport athletes have to have water doing your doing your drug test standing over you whilst you have a pee, right? So, you know, a cheek swab is nothing in comparison to that. If we brought it back, it would sort the problem out instantly. We just go, this category here is for females and we will be sex screening. Yeah. Can I just ask you as a final question,

how optimistic you are about the future? Because a lot of things, as you've said, a lot of governing bodies in sport have changed their regulations over the last couple of years, haven't they? Yes, they have. And I think that the UK has been leading that. You know, we've got triathlon, which at the moment, well, triathlon hasn't chosen to protect the female category. Hopefully they category hopefully they will um volleyball badminton rugby obviously swimming athletics cycling um and we're hoping that world rowing as well will will change but british rowing has changed you know we have to find room for everyone to do sport i categorically 100 believe that i've

spent my whole life trying to get people to do sport i know it's really important for our physical and mental health so i don't want anyone to be excluded. But there's an awful lot of propaganda when the word banned is used, because no one is actually banned. They're only banned from a category they don't qualify for. So it's about competing where it's fair. But as it stands, you don't believe, Sharon, that the Olympics next year will be entirely fair? In some sports, I think we probably will be struggling. But in the vast majority of sports, particularly the bigger sports, I think it will be fair. Sharon Davis there. And if you're interested in everything that she's talking about, her book is called Unfair Play, the battle for women's sports. And it's not just about the

current controversy around trans athletes. It's very much about her own experiences when she was a young girl. And I think it just beggars belief, actually, what we now look back on. You know, we were spectators. We saw what was happening to those athletes, the East German athletes. And, you know, I remember having discussions about it

with my mum, but it's just so strange that it just continued I mean it was a crime being committed in plain sight wasn't it? Absolutely and we you're right we just they were figures of fun which is very very sad and Sharon is very sympathetic towards those East German athletes and the treatment they got from the East German state they were utterly powerless to do anything about it and some of them have had health battles that have gone on for many, many years. Some, in fact, I think have already died, haven't they? So it's all very, very grim.

So Sharon Davis is a formidable voice, I think that's one way of putting it, in terms of women's sport. So we wish her the best and have a good weekend. You can join us first thing, not first thing. I mean, we should be doing breakfast. It's everybody else's. the best and have a good weekend uh you can join us first thing not first thing first thing for us we should be doing breakfast it's everybody else it's just a bit of an early start uh three o'clock on monday afternoon on the radio yes they let us do it live quite extraordinary and then back with

off air on monday uh whenever you get it have a lovely couple of days our guest on monday will be the influencer and comedian and model and general life enhancer, Fats Timbo. That's on Monday. Good evening. Good evening. We're bringing the shutters down on another episode of the internationally acclaimed podcast Off Air with Jane Garvey and Fee Glover. Our Times Radio producer is Rosie Cutler

and the podcast executive producer is Henry Tribe. But don't forget that you can get another two hours of us every Monday to Thursday afternoon here on Times Radio. We start at 3pm and you can listen for free on your smart speaker. Just shout Play Times Radio at it. You can also get us on DAB

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