A podcast explores how sport is drawing the line between men and women

Tested
Rose Eveleth
NPR and CBC

The Olympics are over. But I am still thinking about the displays of strength, skill, teamwork – and joy. Decathlete Markus Rooth skipping as he realised he had won his 100 metre heat. The women of Italy’s gold medal-winning fencing team huddled to celebrate each other. Gymnast Jordan Chiles almost crying at the conclusion of her dazzling floor routine while her proud father thumped his chest in the stands.

I am also thinking about athletes who weren’t in Paris, such as Namibian sprinter Christine Mboma, who won silver in the 200 metres at the Tokyo Olympics at 18. She loves to run – it is where she can forget the hardest parts of her life: “I don’t love it to become famous… It’s in my blood.” Then there is Kenya’s Maximila Imali, a standout in the 400 and 800 metres for the past decade and, more recently, in the 100 and 200. She has held national records in the 100, 200 and 400, as well as the 4 x 200 metres relay.

The pair are at the centre of Tested, a six-part podcast hosted by science journalist Rose Eveleth. It is about how sports have drawn the line between men and women – usually at women’s expense. Eveleth spent nearly a decade researching the stories that became Tested and it shows: each episode is carefully researched and backed by many references.

Like others before them, both Imali’s and Mboma’s early successes made their womanhood suspect to some. Given blood tests and invasive physical exams (“I went home crying,” says Imali) at the behest of World Athletics, the body governing international track and field, they were faced with a career-defining choice.

Both see themselves as women, and always have. But World Athletics classes them as having differences in sex development, also known as intersex. This is any of several conditions characterised by someone’s sex chromosomes, balance of sex hormones, internal anatomy or external genitalia diverging from the expected.

Mboma and Imali have higher levels of testosterone than average for women without differences in sex development. They received an ultimatum: to run at elite level, they must lower this hormone to what World Athletics deems an acceptable level – a target above the average for most women, but below the lowest level typically seen in men.

Tested follows their responses. Mboma chooses to suppress her testosterone, a difficult trial-and-error process for which she and her doctor receive little help, and one the World Medical Association considers unethical. She tries, and fails, to qualify for the Paris games.

As for Imali, at 28, every missed Olympics may be her last chance. Yet she decides not to lower her testosterone, but to fight via the international sports court for her right to compete. That verdict is unresolved at the podcast’s end.

These are just two stories in the century-plus history of women in elite athletics, which moves from a brief, humiliating era of “nude parades” and genital inspections to decades of blood tests and “certificates of femininity”. Today, the test for running is based on testosterone levels. But, as Tested shows, there is so much we still don’t know about this hormone.

Among the other questions the podcast asks are why is everyone who has been dubbed “too masculine” since 2009 a women of colour from a lower-income nation? How much does testosterone actually matter in performance? Why are sex hormones the basis of division at all when so many other factors drive success in sports – including other genetics and your country’s prosperity? What is the point of these categories we have made in the name of fairness?

Science alone can’t answer. Nor will this series. But what Tested does so well is context: history, science, contested data, politics and an invitation to think more deeply about things we take for granted. And we are also invited to wonder, with Eveleth: “How much suffering is worth allowing – and whose – in the name of categorising?”