By Daily sports on July 8, 2021

Namibian track and field stars Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi – both aged 18 – have turned in four of the top five women’s 400m times in the world this year.

They were on a fast-track to Olympic medals, but then their stellar rise came to a sudden halt.

The pair have been banned from competing in the women’s 400m race at the Tokyo Games. The reasoning: their natural testosterone levels are too high.

The teenagers were both racing at international events when they learned the news.

Christine Mboma was with the duo's coach, Henk Botha, travelling back to their training camp in Italy. When their plane landed, Botha received a call from Namibia’s Olympic Committee relaying the news. By the time he was able to call Beatrice Masilingi, his other trainee, she had already found out from social media.

The revelation came as a shock to both athletes. Neither of them had been tested before, and they had no reason to think their hormone levels were not within the typical range.

It’s not the first time female runners have faced this problem. In 2018, Caster Semenya was banned from competing after World Athletics ruled that “to ensure fair competition, women with high natural testosterone levels must take medication to reduce them to compete in middle-distance races”.

But asking someone to take medication to alter something in a body they are happy with is controversial.

“I would ruin the way my body develops because that’ll be something that rearranges everything – how my body functions and everything,” says Masilingi.

“I wouldn’t want to involve any other things because this is the way my body functions in its normal way. And if I try something else, I might get caught somewhere else, and something might go wrong with my body.” (BBC)

•PHOTO: Christine Mboma 

Source Daily sports

Posted July 8, 2021

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