Short Wave - What Is An Unfair Advantage In Sports?

Episode Date: August 10, 2024

We at Short Wave have been following all things Olympics, from the medals and new records to the ugly accusations that two women boxers aren't really women. Last year, the boxers failed gender tests, according to the International Boxing Association. The IBA claims the women have a "hormonal imbalance" that gives them women an unfair advantage. The International Olympic Committee has condemned these claims and defended the boxers' right to compete in the women's category. But this Olympics is far from the first time the gender of athletes has been questioned.NPR's Embedded podcast has a new series called Tested that gets into this history of sex testing in elite sports – in particular, track and field. In this excerpt, host Rose Eveleth digs deep on a big question: What constitutes an "unfair" advantage on the track?Listen to the full Tested series now.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwave is Emily Kwong here. So the Olympics ends this weekend, and I have been riveted, watching the first all-black gymnastics podium of Rebecca Androge, Simone Biles and Jordan Childs take the stage. Breakaway cyclist Kristen Faulkner, rugby player Alona Marr. I mean, the tenacity of these women is just so inspiring. But this Olympics has also come with some serious fear-mongering around gender. Last year, two female boxers, Algeria's Imani Khalif and Taiwan's Lin Yu Ting, were disqualified from the world championships by the International Boxing Association. It stated that they failed gender tests and had an unfair advantage in fights due to their, quote, hormonal imbalance, end quote.

This claim has been condemned by the International Olympic Committee, which runs the Games. The IOC president, Thomas Bach, defended the boxer's right to compete. in the women's category of the games this year. Let's be very clear here. We have two boxes who are born as a woman, who have been raised as a woman, and who have competed for many years as women. There was never any doubt about them being a woman.

What we see now is that some want to own the definition of who is a woman. But this Olympics is not the first time. The gender of athletes has been questioned. And NPR's Embedded podcast has a new series that gets into the history of sex testing in elite sports, and track and field in particular. It's called Tested. Tested is hosted by Rose Eveleth and produced by Embedded, CBC in Canada,

and the production company Bucket Avials. The podcast explores how the international governing body for track and field, World Athletics, has created regulations covering what it calls DSD athletes. DSD stands for differences of sex development. And some athletes with DSDs have higher testosterone than the level considered, quote, normal for women. World Athletics claims this gives them an unfair advantage. So today on the show, what makes an advantage in sports unfair? In this excerpt from tested, Rose digs into that question.

Advantage. It's an interesting word when it comes to sports, because in some ways it's what sports are all about, right? Who is faster or stronger or smarter? And the idea of advantage is the foundation of DSD policies. This claim that some women with DSDs have an advantage over other women. But what does advantage actually mean? Step into my laboratory, will you? Imagine that the walls of this purely hypothetical lab are lined with little vials, each labeled with tiny, precise script.

And within each of these test tubes is some element of athletic advantage. If we combine them, we can create athletic alchemy, the perfect athlete. First, you're going to want the vials labeled time, and money. Those are key to hire coaches, eat right, travel for competition, have the best training facilities, the newest shoes. Next, let's add something a little bit more ineffable, mentality, determination, that single-minded focus. Our perfect athlete beaker is now half-full, but on top of all this stuff, you need the body. Depending on what sport this imaginary athlete might compete in, you'll want to tweak things like height, weight, and body proportions.

For example, Michael Phelps has an incredibly long torso and comparatively short legs, perfect for swimming. There's also a whole section of this lab's wall vials dedicated to genetic mutations that an elite athlete might want. There are at least 20 different genetic factors that researchers have identified as being potentially correlated with athletic performance. So go back to the wall and grab the vial labeled E.P.O.R. An acronym for erythropoietin receptor. This gene determines how good the body is at making red blood cells.

People with this mutation can carry more oxygen in their blood, which helps with aerobic exercise. A Finnish skier named Ero-Montiranta had this exact mutation, and he won seven Olympic medals. And while you're over there, grab the vial labeled Act 3. That one will be handy too. People with this mutation have a slight advantage in powerful sprinting events. You might also grab smaller tweaks from our wall of beneficial mutations. Ace insertion deletion, angiotensinogen, AMPD1, homeostatic iron regulator, lukin 6, doethyelial nitric oxides,

or activated receptor alpha, Cappellant Cappellin protein 2. Some athletes with these kinds of muircatiated amino. are viewed as icons in their sport, like that Finnish skier I mentioned. Here's Morgan Campbell, a sports writer at CBC. We just sort of celebrate him as a medical marvel, right? Whereas in a different context, we would say he is a natural-born cheater. It all depends on, you know, who's lucky enough to get born with the right set of characteristics that fit, you know,

where we decide to draw the line between somebody with a genetic advantage or somebody who we decide is born a cheater. But why is it that some kinds of biological advantages are fine, and others require a whole new rule to be written to remove the alleged advantage? The answer to this question, according to those in favor of regulations, is simple. We don't divide sports by blood oxygen or fast twitch muscles, but we do divide sports by sex. And so, these folks argue, advantages that might be connected to sex are fair game. In 2015, the Court of Arbitration for Sport actually agreed with this idea that sex-based advantages might warrant regulation. But they said that before World Athletics could actually put rules into place, they had to prove just how big this advantage was. If it was big, like 10 or 12%, then sure, that might call for rules like this.

But if it was small, like 2 or 3%, then that's a lot harder to justify, because that would put the advantage in the realm of those other things we just discussed. World Athletics lost their case in 2015 because at the time, they didn't have any evidence to actually show how big this advantage might be. But the ruling was provisional. It suspended the testosterone regulations for two years. years. And it said that sports officials had those two years to go off and find evidence to justify their policies. This directive alone raised some red flags among researchers following this topic.

And it'd be a little bit like, you know, a regulatory agency saying to a tobacco company, hey, you got two years, go gin up some research and tell us that smoking doesn't cause cancer. That's Roger Pilke, a professor of science policy at the University of Colorado Boulder with a special interest in how data is used to shape policy. Cass asked World Athletics to answer a fairly straightforward question. How much of an advantage do athletes with DSDs have? And the ideal study you would do to answer this question is pretty simple. You'd want to compare the testosterone level and performances of DSD athletes with non-DD athletes. But that's not the stuff. But that's not the World Athletics did.

There are no studies, peer-reviewed or not peer-reviewed, of the relative performance of female athletes with certain DSD conditions as compared to female athletes without those conditions. There's just no studies. Instead, they did something slightly different. In 2017, two World Athletics researchers published a paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The study looked at the testosterone level of all athletes, regardless of their DSD status.

And the paper argued that they did actually find evidence that higher testosterone levels meant better performance. But only for some events, mostly the so-called middle distances, the 400, the 400 hurdles, and the 800. But critics of World Athletics noticed a few things about this study. They pointed out that its authors were not independent researchers. They were both associated with world athletics. And experts like Roger also found the actual results kind of weird. Why would testosterone only impact middle distance events? I don't know, my B.

Detector kind of went nuts. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Let's go look at this data and figure out what's going on. Roger made his misgivings public on his blog. Other researchers piled on as well. One called the study a mess. And then, in April of 2018, World Athletics announced a new policy. The first decision this morning was a very, very big decision.

World Athletics President Sebastian Coe said the policy was based, at least in part, on the study it had done. We were asked by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to provide the evidence regarding the magnitude of this advantage, which we now have and the council has been taken. And Coe said that this was one of the organization's, quote, toughest subjects. And I want to make one point really clear, crystal clear up front. This is not about cheating. No HA athletes have cheated. This is about our responsibility as a sports international federation to ensure, in simple terms,

a level playing field. It is our sport, and it is up to us to decide the rules and the regulations. The new rules restored the eligibility restrictions. Once again, women with high testosterone would have to lower it in order to run in the women's category. And the rules only applied to some of the events in which the paper found an advantage, those middle-distance races. Roger Pilke had been hoping to get a look at the paper's data. And a few months after the new policy was released, the study's authors finally allowed him to see some of it.

And when they looked closely, Roger and his collaborators found all kinds of errors. I mean, it was stunning. There was between, I think the numbers like 17 and 32 percent of the data was erroneous. So they had duplicated data, they had phantom data that didn't exist anywhere. They duplicated athletes. They had athletes who doped. Hugely problematic. Eventually, the authors of the original study published a response to the critiques,

admitting that there were some issues with the data and offering up a new analysis. And in that new analysis, the results changed. Only one of the running events cited in the original maintained the level of advantage they claimed. But still, World Athletics stuck. with its regulations. No changes, corrections, or updates. That was Rose Evelyn, host of the new podcast series tested from NPR's Embedded, CBC in Canada, and the production company Bucket of Neals. Roald Athletics, by the way, continues to stand by its research.

The organization declined interview requests for the podcast. In an email to Rose, a representative wrote that World Athletics, quote, has only ever been interested in protecting the female category. If we don't, then women and young girls will not choose sport. End quote. You can binge all six episodes of Tested Now. It's available in the embedded podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to Allison McGatom and Raina Cohen for helping us with this excerpt of Testin together.

I'm Emily Kwong. See you Monday for more Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.