Sex Determination Tests

Sex determination testing first began at the 1966 European Track Field Championships in response to suspicion that several of the best women athletes from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were in fact men posing as women. The International Olympic Committee introduced sex testing in 1968 at the Olympic games in Mexico City, after the masculine appearance of some competitors (many pumped up by anabolic steroids) had started to raise questions about the gender of athletes in female events.

Santhi Soundarajan, a 27 year old track runner, was stripped of her silver medal for the 800m at the Asian Games, suffered tremendous public humiliation and attempted to kill herself. Soundarajan, who has lived her entire life as a woman, failed a gender test.

Walsh, a Polish-American sprinter, was at one point the fastest woman in the world. She set more than 100 national and world records and was inducted into the American Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1975. In 1980, Walsh was killed during an armed robbery. The postmortem revealed she had male genitalia (although this did not prove that she was a man as she was also found to have both male and female chromosomes- a genetic condition known as Mosaicism.)

Dora Ratjen, notable for her deep voice and her refusal to share the shower room with the other female athletes, was Germany's entry (during the Nazi regime) for the women's high jump. She came fourth. Dora, who had been born Hermann Ratjen, had in fact been a member of the Hitler Youth and said that the Nazis had forced him to enter as a woman.

According to the IOC transsexuals, who have had a sex change from male to female, can compete in women's events in the Olympics, as long they wait two years after the operation.