FORUM: May One Seismic Shift On Olympic Heights Follow Another
In the first of a two-part FORUM, we look at the monumental u-turn taken by Kirsty Coventry and the IOC last week, and what it tells us about what should happen next if all those integrity and reform badges on blazers are to be in any way meaningful
THEMA - A SIMPLE MATTER OF TRUTH
Somewhere out there, Cornel Marculescu, the director of FINA between 1986 and 2021, has surely been smiling at what 'reform' came to mean in the sport he governed, and in the Olympic realm that conveys the message of each of its constituent disciplines to a much bigger audience once every four years.
Where does the message - the one that says 'this who we are and what we stand for' - come from? Many rivers and tributaries, of course, but there are two main streams and a third one that does what neither of the others do very well, if at all:
- FOLK AT THE COAL FACE EVERY DAY WHO DRIVE TICKET SALES, KEEP THE SHOW ON THE ROAD + FUND & FUEL IT
The folk actually active on a daily basis doing the work that sells the tickets come race day, the sport as delivered by swimmers, coaches, national performance programs underpinned by the vast network of swimming clubs and programs - local through to international, and all the places where swimmers, parents, coaches and others cut their teeth in the sport at all levels, for safety, for health, and as a professional pursuit, athletic, coaching, scientific, etc.
Swimming has a modest economy and almost nothing that can be described as a thriving business sector, the USA the only country that has had a long-term marketplace, and even there there are signs of decline, despite the investment and 'partnership arrangements' related to premier events such as U.S. Olympic trials, and, on a much grander scale, the Olympic Games schedule for Los Angeles in 2028*.
All of that is propped up by the greatest hidden flow of subsidies to Olympic sport, the bank of mum and dad, community and sport-specific support that has no ticket to the party, let alone the multi-billion-dollar Olympic business, come the showcase they have contributed to (massively en masse around the world), the showcase that changes statuses and lives once every four years (NB: largely, the results do not affect the status and lives in sport of those who govern, the record shows to an overwhelming degree).
Yes, all those who make up the show-stopper end of the pool, and make up a sizable chunk of fandom in swimming, can line up to buy a ticket for a place in the stands, but the vast majority of them are stakeholders with neither access nor voice, let alone vote.
They are largely locked out, the one time and place they may gain some recognition for their contribution the media and its mixed zone: here we find the athlete on the trail of post-race broadcast booths and then moving on to a chat over the fence with the mainstream press with a much bigger wider-audience reach than any direct-to-fan messaging, or niche player, blogger, vlogger, influencer, seller of questionable expertise or hobby scribbler out there. After that, there's the late-night national broadcast studio to visit for the deepest reach of home-crowd viewers. It's along that trail that the athlete, and more so the one who emerges with a golden orb or other prize round their neck, gets a chance to give those they 'could not have done it without' a little of that human touch, with a sprinkle of Wharholian 15 minutes of fame.
Not always and not in every case, but this group is often and largely silent when things go wrong. The reasons swing between 'we have a job to do, and can do without distractions' (to some extent, a fair and understandable point), and fear of consequence in a realm that has seen consequences galore meted out to athletes and coaches down the decades but very rarely any consequences for blazers who, if there is any judgement at all, judge themselves rather more kindly than those they are often quick to punish.
The 'fear' also extends to consequences for those who point out wrongdoing and uneven treatment in anti-doping cases, in various ways, along a spectrum including:
- the first big case, a teenage Rick Demont paying a price for institutional stupidity
- generations of athletes, mainly women, who had their swimming careers and life-long opportunities kicked to the curb by systematic doping and the failure of governors to acknowledge, let alone investigate and act upon, the theft and fraud that unfolded on their watch:
Craig Lord
- the China crisis of the 1990s that spills in the pool to this day
- the Sun Yang saga and what that taught us
- the 23-go-free saga and what that taught us - and continues to teach us
Craig Lord
- * - The actual staging of the Games and how it will turn out is, to a large extent, now beyond the control of the IOC at a time of global economic turmoil driven by the wars started and responded to (state-doping-denier Putin and Russia's attack on Ukraine, with no exit plan in sight; and now Enhanced-Games advocate Trump and the USA's attack on Iran, with no exit plan in sight), and all of that on the back of the Covid pandemic. The political cocktail is one that could quite easily spill into Olympic sport, the boycott ghosts of Montreal 1976, then Moscow 1980, then Los Angeles 1984, hovering in the air over the Duma and its defence HQ on the Frunzenskaya Embankment in Moscow, and the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., and its Pentagon Department of Defense HQ in Arlington County, Virginia, across the Potomac River from the capital.
- BLAZERS - THE PAID AND THE UNPAID BUT HIGHLY REWARDED
The governance of the sport, a realm that has largely operated and continues to operate in the absence of independent checks and balances when governors get things wrong; a realm occupied by leading figures who have often, sometimes seemingly always, prioritised their self-interests over the welfare and best-interests of the sports they govern and the stakeholders they claim to 'serve'. Motivation includes this: status quo - their will to remain, in authority, globetrotting lifestyles and rubbing shoulders with the stars of the sports show and folk far more powerful still who also think of athletes as good for their image, the sports-world equivalent of that old-fashioned practice of politicians kissing babies on the campaign trail.
The forked question has been, and remains, 'are they fit for office - and who and what do they serve?' In the past decade, the term 'reform' has been adopted as something of a mantra, one that has held hands with the establishment of Integrity Units that are not only said to be independent but held up as proof that truth, transparency and an ethical and moral backbone have sprouted like wings on the shoulders of blazers bearing "Integrity" badges of self-declared honour.
- THE CONSCIENCE, CASSANDRAS & WHISTLEBLOWERS
In the third stream, we find the people who are genuinely seeking to get truth told, calling for much-needed change, and appealing to the folk in the two streams above to change course.
These are folk who see the difference between a storm of pledges and integrity claims that rarely make the leap from word to deed, integrity units that appear incapable or unwilling to apply to the governor the same level of rigorous controls, checks and balances demanded of athletes.
Stream No3 is where the conscience of sport meets the whistleblower who confirms the veracity of the red flags long sent flying by the Cassandras of sport.
The 'conscience' calls for action of a kind we can all celebrate as deeds that truly 'serve' the people who the executive volunteers claim to be serving. The 'conscience' includes academics, journalists, bureaucrats, athletes, coaches, scientists, doctors, lawyers, parents and even inner-circle folk who, frankly, can no longer abide the stench of culture and practices well past their sell-by date. The 'conscience' rarely moves as one, and even more rarely in large numbers of people happy to stand up and be counted in their own name.
On the rare occasions when that does happen, seismic shifts are possible: rules that protect the women's category for females is one example; the foundation of the International Swimming League (ISL) is another; shiny suits before that, and in the middle; and since then the Russian doping crisis, only up to a point, and of late, the China 23-go-free saga and lamentable and damaging lack of trust in WADA that flowed from events that handed the Enhanced Games a trump card in a game for which other forms of harm may flow.
With that background in mind, the past week has been heartening because we got a rare glimpse of what can happen when those with power find themselves in the same lane as those who have long called on the regulator class to take the plunge into truth.
It took a woman - and a swimmer at that - to finally hand safe and fair play, with no significant compromises, back to female athletes. Kirsty Coventry has some steep challenges ahead of her yet, but last Thursday, the Games queen with Olympic swimming gold in the bank was rightly praised for having led a complete u-turn in her presidential role at the International Olympic Committee.
Good for her - but also fair to pay still bigger plaudits to her fellow female athletes and supporters who have been speaking truth to power for decades - and in the last decade specifically on the subject of safe and fair play and ensuring that women are not discriminated against by the presence of male athletes gaining access to the female category by identifying outside their biological sex category.
People from a diverse range of political views and standpoints who have found common ground where we should all find it: truth. They include swimming aces Sharron Davies, at the Women's Sports Union, Nancy Hogshead at Champion Women, Donna de Varona and team at the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group (where we also find a champion athlete voice in tennis ace Martina Navratilova), and many other swim pioneers who have stood up and been counted in a variety of ways, Sippy Woodhead, Cate Campbell and Summer Sanders among them. There are also women's advocates such as author J.K. Rowling; coach Dr. Linda Blade, and academics like Dr. Emma Hilton, Cathy Devine, Dr. Carole Hooven, author of 'T: The Story of Testosterone...'; like Hilton's fellow campaigners at Sex Matters in the UK; and the ICONS group founded across the Pond by swimmer Marshi Smith and tennis player Kim Jones, a swimming mom, to name but a few.
Here's what the IOC decision means to many affected by what has unfolded since 2016 as a result of rule changes in late 2015 (described in Unfair Play) - Lyndsey Sharp, of Britain, was one of three women who finished behind an 800m track podium fully populated by male DSD athletes with male advantage:
"It was a really difficult time, and sadly it did kind of taint my experience in the sport and at the Olympics in Rio."
— Sky News (@SkyNews) September 20, 2025
Former Team GB 800m runner Lynsey Sharp tells Sky's @SkyJacquie that new gene testing rules would have earned her Olympic bronze in 2016. pic.twitter.com/oGXWS8V2Gy
The views of and impact on Sharp and many other women are dismissed outright by American runner Nikki Hiltz - described, oddly, as a "transgender" & non-binary Olympian by her supporters. In sport, of course, Hiltz, who is female, runs as a female in the women's category. If she had opted to run among men, we would never have heard of her) . Here is what she had to say:
“I don't know who needs to hear this but ZERO trans women competed in the Paris Olympics. Only ONE trans woman weightlifter competed in Tokyo 2021 and she did not win a medal. Can we please stop obsessing over trans people?... maybe focus our time, energy, and resources into real problems women's sports face?”
Well, if that's the case, then why is she so upset that a rule is in place that would only ever, in her opinion, affect one or two individuals, as opposed to half of humanity? Is she really arguing that it's ok to be tolerant of a Hubbard while dismissing a Roviel as a moaning Minnie? You're recall the case of 18-year-old Roviel Detenamo from the island of Nauru, who missed out on becoming an Olympian because the continental cut in weightlifting favoured a male lifter:
Sean Ingle
The Fair Play response:
FPFW
The first three sentences of Hiltz's opinion represent avoidance of the real world and experience of women.The Olympic Games is the height of Olympic sport that includes world elite senior championships, global championships for juniors, masters, and a vast number of regional,. continental and domestic events at which scores and scores and scores of arguments has erupted over the presence of male athletes in female events in which those male athletes claimed prizes. IN Paris, we saw fights that ended in Olympic gold for two boxers with DSDs that effectively meant the women claiming silver had been thumped into submission by athletes with male advantage: unfair - and unsafe.
The last of Hiltz's sentences "focus our time, energy, and resources into real problems women's sports face" is spot on. Now that Olympic sport has returned to observing its Charter and the gateway to eligibility that starts at male and female - as always intended - women can, indeed, stop wasting their time, energy, physical and psychological, on an issue that ought never to have been one.
Support for getting the IOC to u-turn has also been there from male colleagues from the coaching, scientific and academic community, journalists and authors who spent the best part of a decade asking for truth to be told. The Olympic rule has changed - yet still this nonsense persists, a case U.S. Masters should drop altogether before we expose the full toxicity of those pressing a complaint on grounds that scream back at them from a mirror of their own making:
Craig Lord
It's not 'our' or their' truth those women and others have been speaking to power. It's the truth. Biological facts - and the truth told in the Olympic Charter, which commits to safe and fair play, sex equality - and that in a realm where the gateway to categorisation had always been understood to start with Men through one gate, Women through another, biological reality, not feelings, the divider for all the right reasons in sport.
After a quarter of a century of missteps on the issue at the IOC, Thomas Bach the last president to listen to the wrong voices and head in completely the wrong direction, Coventry did what she and her team will need to do on many more issues: she rallied the support she needed, she took a solid leadership stance and then stood up for truth.
In sport, that means transwomen, because their biology is male, as well as DSD conditions that deliver male advantage to the athlete, cannot compete in the women's category at the Olympic Games from 2028. World Rugby, World Aquatics, World Athletics had all gone that way between 2020 and 2023.
Coventry has got the IOC to catch-up, even overtake them all, and send a message to every lagging international federation out there: you shall not discriminate against female athletes, aka - women.
Pushback is out there, of course. We could spend a lot of time and energy mopping up the excuses and explanations of Hiltz, campaigners wearing 'be kind' badges while being anything but kind to women, human-rights lawyers, and even scientists who appear to have forgotten their creed and purpose as they cite studies of four and fewer humans as cast-iron 'evidence' that male advantage is a fabrication.
We know it's not. Beyond the science, there's 130 years of Olympic results that scream of the reality standing sentry like at the gateway to eligibility: the margin of male over female performance advantage in a wide range of sports is far too great for anyone who wants to be taken seriously to ignore.
Those pushing back now wish to make sex tests their next big reason for suggesting the IOC and Coventry have got it wrong. Here's truth in place a long time ago: Cathy Devine's research showed decades ago, after sex tests were dropped, that women have no issue with a simple, non-invasive cheek swab that protects the integrity of their category:
Delighted that my research article 'Female Olympians’ voices: Female sports categories and International Olympic Committee Transgender guidelines' is just published in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport:https://t.co/eHmNiX3YPv
— Cathy Devine (@cathydevine56) June 24, 2021
In retweeting this article from SOS, Sharron Davies also noted:
“The female category to be returned to females at the Olympics. This must also happen at grassroots and recreational [levels]. Sex-based protection cannot only be for the top one percent.”
Just so! Wayne Goldsmith has, rightly, pointed out the downside of the sports "pathway", but he and all the rest of us blokes with grandmothers, mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, grandchildren and on and on - us blokes who have swum, trained alongside girls and women, become coaches or served in other roles and capacities in a sport that is among the central facets and spheres of our lives - know very well that pathways are much broader than talent-spotting and selection processes.
They can be summed up with one word: opportunity. Take that and introduce it to another critical ingredient - knowledge - in a cake personal to each of us: thriving in whatever realm we choose in pursuit of getting the best out of ourselves and for ourselves and those we spend our lives with.
In sport, we know that the dropout rate among girls aged around 12 is almost cliff-like. The 'why?' list is long on possibilities, but among them are puberty, hormonal changes, body image, a growing understanding of what kind of environment they want to spend their time in.
And all of that and much more were a part of life long before the IOC's careless and glib disregard, followed by wilful blindness, of and at the very gateway of categorisation in sport that speaks to safe and fair play: sex. Not gender, not identity, not self-identity, not 'free will to feel and be whoever you are'. Sex matters - and in sport it means male advantage of between 10 (eg, swimming around 11-13%) and over 50% (eg, baseball pitch, field-hockey drag flick):
See: Hilton EN, Lundberg TR. Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage. Sports Med. 2021 Feb;51(2):199-214. doi: 10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3. Erratum in: Sports Med. 2021 Oct;51(10):2235. doi: 10.1007/s40279-021-01480-3. PMID: 33289906; PMCID: PMC7846503.
In swimming, men and women have trained together for many decades, and still do. They compete as teammates in their own categories on race day at almost all domestic and international competitions (the NCAA is among exceptions in championship season, making their role and stance in the saga of swimmer Thomas all the more ludicrous). These days, they even race alongside teammates of the opposite sex in mixed relays, the quartets of which are balanced so that there are two men and two women side by side and the competition remains one of male vs male strength and female vs female strength.
That's Fair Play - something the IOC has now embraced when it comes to recognising anew that the women's category must be for females only if safe and fair play and sex equality commitments in the Olympic Charter are to be honoured.
Coventry's legacy will now include one big pillar for womankind, fair and safe sport that the 'visions' of Bach and the missteps of presidents before him can never claim. They failed. Truth counts, and you could see that come through in Coventry in the tears she shed while trying to justify the removal of a Ukrainian rider from the Winter Olympics of late, on the eve of the IPC letting Russians back into the Paralympic fold, politics dripping with the blood on Putin's hands from every Russian flag at the Winter Games.
The argument is clear even if you don't go as far as the IPC. Russians are competing on a regular basis once more in Olympic sports. It's preparation for the moment Coventry may do what the IPC has done on the way to LA2028: let the Russians, the flags, the national emblems, the representation of Putin and Co all back in.
I agree with the notion that the pre-race and post-race media interviews are a better place for athletes to speak of their challenges, sorrows, joys and views on political events that are causing the deaths of teammates and many others in their country.
I also think that if you allow Russians to compete as neutrals and pretend the world doesn't know why, then you can allow a Ukrainian to wear the images of athletes from his country killed by Russians invading a sovereign country - and pretend the world doesn't know why.
It is all too easy to take that thought further and ask: does the IOC, and do international federations really imagine that we're all too stupid to see the very real connections between some of those Russian athletes (and the officials that accompany them) with the Russian regime. A regime that just over a decade ago was proven to have been involved in the establishment and running of a secret facility built next to the official anti-doping lab at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Games (in the year that Putin invaded Crimea)?
Do they imagine we all missed the references to state security agents operating in a room next to the lab, taking part in and protecting an operation in which clean samples were exchanged with evidence of fraud through plug holes in the wall between 'clean sport guardians' and 'GDR all over again'?
Coventry is easily smart enough to know why overlooking the above on Russia while robbing one Ukrainian of his place and status at the Olympics is a crass and insensitive misstep.
It seemed to me that that was why we saw tears fall down the cheeks of the new IOC president up in the Italian mountains in February. She faces many other exhale ages, too, including this one:
Jens Weinreich
In every interview that Davies gave in the UK last Thursday, she paid plaudits to Kirsty Coventry while also noting that the pain need never have been, because the evidence was there all along, from the very beginning. We all knew why men race men and women race women.
Yet the IOC decided to hook itself to all the daftness felled in this fine paper:
When Ideology Trumps Science - A response to the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport’s Review on Transwomen Athletes in the Female Category
- © Cathy Devine1, Emma Hilton2, Leslie Howe3, Miroslav Imbrišević4, Tommy Lundberg5, Jon Pike4
- 1 Independent Scholar; 2 University of Manchester; 3 University of Saskatchewan; 4 Open University (UK); 5 Karolinska Institutet
The trail of that and related history that includes the IOC's latest decade of failing women can be read in Davies book, with this author, Unfair Play: The Battle For Women's Sport', complete with references galore:
Author profile page
Davies' point is that silence is never golden when truth is being denied. One of Coventry's challenges in the years ahead is to consider where the IOC has failed and is still failing the integrity test. The truth, recognition and reconciliation process is long overdue when it comes to the life-long harm its lack of honesty caused to generations of athletes every time it turned a wilful blind eye to the proven fraud of GDR doping on IOC watch and at IOC accredited facilities.
As ever, the athletes will not be holding their breath, it having been at least decades since the fall of their Berlin Wall and the revelations that emerged from the rubble allowed them to dare to dream of the recognition they were denied.
Even so, perhaps they may now hope again: if any president was ever going to do the right thing for all concerned and the reputation of Olympic sport, then perhaps that president might be a woman. Could Coventry, finally, be their champion among decision makers?
The bubble must be burst from inside. From another realm, this is the culture of Omertà that Coventry, the IOC, the leaders of international federations, must now overcome if those 'Integrity' and "Reform' badges on their blazers are to mean anything at all:
Marius Dobel-Ober
That's from the world of fencing, but very similar could be said of swimming, and in part 2 of this Forum, we'll return to Cornel Marculescu, what the Sun Yang saga teaches us, and why his FINA 'granddad' may well be out there smiling.
- Part 1 of this FORUM is offered free to view as a matter of record on a seismic moment in Olympic sport. The FORUM is also part of our subscriber offer - and part 2 will be available soon for readers whose contributions help keep our coverage alive. Thank you.
