Feeding My Ignorance

Just a few days after I was pontificating on the difficulties of defining what it meant to be a "drug free" athlete the headlines at the Olympics have once again swung towards someone who has an "unfair advantage" through no fault of her own.

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Caster Semenya has elicited controversy ever since she first appeared on the athletics scene. She has, seemingly, one of forty six "intersex" conditions. These are conditions that - one way or another - challenge our binary understandings of what is a man and what is a woman. Clearly this raises a huge dilemma in any situation where men and women are separated accoring to gender in any way.

Caster is not alone - one article estimates that around one person in every 3000 in some way breaks the mould, so to speak, and falls somewhere in the middle of the male to female spectrum. Its not a black and white decision - far from clear cut - and certainly more than fifty shades of grey!! What makes Caster 'special' is that she has an ability to run very fast - much faster than her female rivals - at least one of whom knows that it is a race for second place behind her.

All of the rules put in place (particularly when it comes to the paralympics) to ensure that like competes against like do not cater for these outliers. Of course, we are all unique, and that is a good thing, but in terms of measuring 'ability' - whether it be in sports, or art, or linguistics, or anything else - there is seldom a universal metric that cancels out all of the 'unacceptable' variations.

In some situations a handicap system is fair - however that clearly can't be the case when the "test" is how fast can you run or how high can you jump or how far can you throw. The focus needs to be different and this is problematic since whatever the "aim" is there will always be ways in which an individual can 'cheat' or otherwise gain some unfair advantage in achieving that aim.

Things are relatively simple when a group of friends challenge each other to see who can run the fastest. The person who gets from A to B quickest is the winner. The next time that it happens it might be different as one of the friends has turned up in running shoes.... We would each try to improve our chances - that is human nature. If there was some prize over and above bragging rights amongst friends then those higher stakes would naturally induce greater efforts.

Another "border-line" cheating highlighted was the lunge at the line from Shaunae Miller - although personally I could not believe that some people classed that as anything other than "trying very hard"!! Of course every time we see any sport on TV - covered from every conceivable angle by cameras (except the cycling last night - but that's another story!!) - there are numerous examples of "bending the rules" and hoping the referee doesn't spot it even when the forty nine cameras and tweny three experts commentating are bound to notice!

Of course doing away with all rules wouldn't work - as I said in my previous posts the rules define the "game" - so there must be a set of enforceable rules for each game/sport. Too often though the rule set has become so complicated that it is impossible to know whether your are infringing or not.

I expect that there will be rules put in place to stop athletes like Caster Semenya dominating her event - that is both right (because it should be an "even" playing field) and wrong (because she shouldn't be denied the opportunity to compete against her equals). It highlights the difficulties we place on ourselves because of "simplifications" that we must make in order to cope with the complexity in the world.

We can deal with the population being split into males and females. Understanding that few people are "pure" male or "pure" female and that most are some sort of mixture is much more difficult to grasp.

So it is with many other things - we "deal with it" by saying its A or B. The reality is it is "some of A" and "some of B" - either/or is often inadequate (and both/and) actually goes too far in the opposite direction. Shades of grey indeed.