Track and field sets Sept. 1 deadline for female eligibility gene tests ahead of worlds in Tokyo

MONACO (AP) — Clarifying promised rules on female eligibility, track and field’s governing body set a Sept. 1 deadline Wednesday for athletes to pass a gene test for competing at the world championships.

World Athletics said in March it would require chromosome testing by cheek swabs or dry blood-spot tests for female athletes to be eligible for elite-level events.

The next worlds open Sept. 13 in Tokyo and Sept. 1 is “the closing date for entries and the date the regulations come into effect,” World Athletics said in a statement.

The latest rules update gives certainty for the 2025 championships in an issue that has been controversial on the track and in multiple courts since Caster Semenya won her first 800 meters world title as a teenager in 2009.

Semenya won a ruling at the European Court of Human Rights three weeks ago in Strasbourg, France, in the South Africa star’s years-long challenge to a previous version of track and field’s eligibility rules affecting athletes with medical conditions known as Differences in Sex Development. That legal win because she did not get a fair hearing at the Swiss supreme court did not overturn track’s rules.

World Athletics drew up rules in 2018 forcing two-time Olympic champion Semenya and other athletes with DSD to suppress their elevated natural testosterone levels to be eligible for international women’s events. Semenya refused to take medication.

Now, the Monaco-based track body requires a “once-in-a-lifetime test” to determine athletes it says are biologically male with a Y chromosome.

“We are saying, at elite level, for you to compete in the female category, you have to be biologically female,” World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said.

The governing body is covering up to $100 of the costs for each test with the protocol overseen by its member federations at national level. Test results should be ready within two weeks.

“The SRY test is extremely accurate and the risk of false negative or positive is extremely unlikely,” World Athletics said.

World Athletics has combined its eligibility framework for DSD and transgender athletes, with transitional rules that let “a very small number of known DSD athletes” continue competing if they are taking medication to suppress natural testosterone.

“The transitional provisions do not apply to transgender women as there are none competing at the elite international level under the current regulations,” World Athletics said.

Now age 34, and her track career effectively over, Semenya should now see her legal case go back to the Swiss federal court in Lausanne, where she lost her original appeal against track and field’s rules at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

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