Tarnished gold

On a stormy afternoon in Pretoria a hooded figure runs steadily in the distance, head held high against the big black clouds rolling over the city.

It is hard to tell if we are following a man or a woman for, even when the sky is lit by lightning, we're shrouded in gloom. Half a mile ahead of us, with fat drops of rain smearing the dusty windscreen, a solitary runner looks vulnerable.

Michael Seme, in the passenger seat of our car, squints into the gathering darkness, trying to work out the identity of the slender shape running so defiantly. "Is this one of my boys?" the 50-year-old athletics coach murmurs. His fatigue is tempered by the generous spirit that helps him rise at 3.30 every morning to encourage his young runners so that by 4am they are on the road, dreaming of World Championship and Olympic glory. "It's Caster," he suddenly shouts, pointing at the runner who is now less than 100m away. "Give her a hoot."

Caster Semenya, the world's most haunted and controversial athlete, an 18-year-old black South African woman who had been catapulted into infamy just before one of the sporting achievements of the year, turns sharply at the toot-toot of a horn. Her eyes open wide as she sees her grinning coach, Seme, the man she and all her friends call "Sponge", and whom they trust with their lives.

Seme has worked with Semenya since January, turning an erratic and unknown teenage amateur into a world champion in the space of eight extraordinary months. He leans over to open the back door and, whooping in relief, Semenya slides across the back seat.

"Ai, Sponge," she yelps, "this is the first time you give me VIP service to training." Smiling broadly, Semenya holds out her hand to me. "You made it just in time," she says, with a crushing handshake and a wink. It feels mildly perplexing to have a person as usually elusive and apparently troubled as Semenya rocking with laughter in the back of my battered Toyota Corolla.

The day before, when arriving in Pretoria to meet Seme for the first time, I had been eyed suspiciously for an hour by one of Semenya's bodyguards. He had eventually become a little friendlier, before boredom kicked in and he drifted away.

Semenya's spontaneous delight, in contrast, is as uplifting as it is contagious. Grinning at her in the rearview mirror, asking how she feels on her first afternoon back at training since she won gold in the women's 800m at the world championships in Berlin, I do not even see a speed-bump in the road ahead.

We hit it hard and Semenya cracks her head against the car roof. She winces, but laughs again at my bumbling apology. This fleeting pain is nothing compared to the protracted agony she has endured since Berlin. ON AUGUST 19 Semenya's victory in the 800m final was as decisive as the surrounding circumstances were shocking.

The previous day the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) announced that Semenya had been the subject of "gender verification tests" in both South Africa and Germany. An endocrinologist, a gynaecologist and a psychologist had all tried to establish whether Semenya, who had lived her whole life as a girl, was actually a man.

Widespread sex-testing of female athletes had initially been introduced by the IAAF in the 1960s only to be largely suspended in the late 1990s when scientists regularly questioned the veracity of their findings. The IAAF appeared uncertain how best to proceed in the tangled case of Semenya.

In their desire to quash excitable whispers about Semenya's imposing physique in Berlin, it proceeded to reveal that sex tests had been held. Yet the results, and further tests, would take many more weeks or even months to emerge. It looked as if they were protecting themselves - rather than an exposed young woman - from a furiously curious world. Semenya could still run in the final.

A less resilient individual would have slunk away in the hope of being spared further invasive scrutiny. But the teenager, displaying marked mental strength, resolved to seize the opportunity she and Seme had worked so hard for all year. On that unforgettable night she lined up in lane four, stoically ignoring the flashing photographers and the unblinking television cameras, as she stared down the track.

The British runner, Jenny Meadows, looked diminutive and slight alongside the muscled frame of the South African. Meadows ran bravely and finished third behind an imperious Semenya - whose winning time of 1min 55.45sec was a personal best, the fastest by a woman in 2009 and more than eight seconds quicker than she had run a year before. Meadows praised her as "a great athlete" but the Italian Elisa Cusma, who came sixth in the final, sneered bluntly of the new champion, "she is a man".

The Sun newspaper ran a hurtful "800m and two veg" headline. Semenya's surprising triumph had become a degrading, international affair. "It's legally very complex," said Nick Davies, the IAAF's director of communications when questioned that night about the ruling body's startling pronouncements with regard to Semenya.

"It's a medical issue. It's not an issue of cheating. We're more concerned not to make this something which is humiliating for her and something which is going to affect her in a negative way. This is why you will appreciate we have to be discreet. She is a human being who was born as a woman and who has grown up all her life as a woman, but who is now in a position where this is being questioned."

Athletics South Africa, under its now-disgraced and suspended president, Leonard Chuene, accused the IAAF of racism. Chuene denied having tricked Semenya into a similar "gender verification test" a month earlier - a lie he has since been forced to admit. South Africa's Sports Minister, Makhenkesi Stofile, meanwhile, warned that the country would unleash "a third world war" should sensationalist rumours that Semenya was intersex be confirmed in an official report.

Jacob Zuma, the country's president, was more rational. Considering a claim that Semenya had been born as a female without a womb, and with internal testes that produce unusually high levels of testosterone for a woman, Zuma said: "I don't know why we should not respect the privilege between the doctor and the patient. Why, when the tests have been done, was it published?"

Confused and hurt, and hemmed in by her rollicking celebrity in South Africa and her notoriety in world sport, Semenya has had to stop running and wait anxiously. That tortuous process will hopefully end soon with the IAAF due to announce a ruling on the medical tests and legal wrangling that has since turned Semenya's world inside-out. Her life as an athlete, and a young woman, will be decided as the IAAF reveals whether it plans to ban her from competing again, order her to undergo surgery or allow her to remain herself.

It is difficult to square this distressing saga with the sight of a jubilant Semenya climbing out of an old car in Pretoria. Amid loud greetings and high-fives, she embraces her closest friends in the tightly knit group of elite athletes who train with Seme in a secluded area at the University of Pretoria. The session is meant to mark a return to normality.

In an effort to help Semenya regain the composure that has been shredded since Berlin, and prepare her for her upcoming year-end university exams, she is resuming training. Seme has already admitted that Semenya had been traumatised by Berlin and its aftermath. But her mood appears rejuvenated - especially since she and Seme were both honoured at the University of Pretoria in October with their respective awards as sportswoman of the year and coach of the year.

Yet more than anything, Semenya wants to feel the comforting spring of the track beneath her blurring feet. Between the curved and straight white lines, running bends and hurtling down the flat, Semenya feels at home. Her fervour is plain as, jiggling with energy and shooting out her legs in jokey karate moves, she urges that they take to the track. "I am myself here," she says. "Everyone just accepts me. They know who I am. I am just Caster to these guys. I feel good with them."

Semenya shrugs when asked if she can ever feel relaxed outside this soothing enclave. "It's not so easy. The university is okay but there are not many other places I can go. People want to stare at me now. They want to touch me. I'm supposed to be famous but I don't think I like it so much. I feel much better here - with Sponge and the athletes." The outside world, for Semenya, has become a restricted and haunting place. "I can't go shopping no more," she laughs, a traditional girly lament sounding heart-wrenching when uttered in her relatively gruff voice.

"Can you believe it?" Can she believe the depths to which human nature can also sink - as the curious and the prurient, the scandalised and the judgmental, rush to make assumptions about her? Has she not felt despair at the reaction of others towards her? "No," she says with a flash of defiance. "I know who I am. I can't change what they say." Has Semenya herself changed during this ordeal? She shakes her head again, her face softening this time. "What is the point of me changing? If I became another person it would be bad. If I acted in a different way with my friends they would not be happy. It's important I stay the same. I can still laugh with my friends." Her determination has been apparent throughout a tumultuous 2009.

When she joined the training camp in the first weeks of this year, Semenya was subjected to some comprehensive defeats on the track. "It was hard for her in the beginning," says her close friend, Ledile Violete Raseboya, an international cross-country and middle-distance runner. "She was running very slow times.

At one meeting in Port Elizabeth it took her five minutes to run 1500m. Sponge was on the side of the track, telling her to quit. It was too embarrassing but Caster would not quit, even if they were going to lap her over 1500m." Why did she not quit? "I am a fighter," Semenya says evenly. "I never give up. And I knew I was going to get better." Raseboya nods. "Caster is very strong. She is brave. I saw that when she was in Berlin. I was injured and so I couldn't run but I spent a lot of money calling Caster from South Africa. I spoke to her many times every day because I want to boost her. There was a lot of crazy things going on."

Semenya shakes her head, sidestepping the sex doubts and tests. "In Berlin," she says quietly, "I just wanted to run." "On the day of the final, I phone her," Raseboya remembers, the memory of the controversy clouding her intelligent face. "I say, 'Caster, what are you going to do?"' Semenya leans forward. "I told Violete: 'I will run'.

After the first two races in Berlin I thought I could beat everyone. And I did." Semenya wrapped herself in the South African flag which Raseboya had given her just she before left Johannesburg - and tried to retreat from the glare of world attention. "Caster was surprised when I called her next and I told her that her parents and other members of her family were going to meet her at the airport in Johannesburg. I had taken her to the airport to catch her flight but, this time, I said I would not be there to meet her. I would see her on the weekend but, at the airport, there would be no space for me, there would be thousands of people waiting for her. She could not believe it. And, since, life has not been normal for Caster."

Life has rarely been conventional for Mokgadi Caster Semenya. Born in Ga-Masehlong and raised in Fairlie, two small black South African villages deep in the province of northern Limpopo, the tough little girl who preferred football and wrestling to wearing dresses or brushing the hair of a doll, always lived on the margins of an otherwise strict "gender" divide. She was strong enough to follow her own interests and passion and, in an effort to improve her stamina as a footballer, she took to running the dirt roads around Fairlie.

Semenya was teased and mocked as a tomboy. And the steeliness so evident in her today was forged in those fiercely independent, yet occasionally lonely, days in Fairlie. Her 80-year-old grandmother, Maphuthi Sekgala, said: "If the teasing hurt her, she kept the hurt to herself and didn't show what she was feeling." Her parents accepted her and so the outcry in Berlin, especially the revelations of the IAAF and ASA's "gender testing", cut the family to the core. "I know she is a woman - I raised her myself," her grandmother stresses. "She called me after [the heats] and told me that they think she is a man. What can I do when they call her a man, when she's really not a man? It is God who made her look that way."

Dorcus, her mother, is indignant. "Ask any of my neighbours and they will tell you Mokgadi is a girl. They know because they helped raise her. People can say what they like but the truth will remain - which is that my child is a girl." Semenya's father, Jacob, says: "She is my little girl. I have never doubted her sex. She is a woman and I can repeat that a million times."

The unassuming Seme, with more detachment than her family, could observe the pain in his young athlete. He noted that Semenya had been "crudely humiliated" this year - "Caster has to explain again that she can't help the fact that her voice is so gruff and that she is really a girl. The remarkable thing is that Caster remains completely calm and never loses her dignity when she is questioned about her gender."

Seme is far more comfortable discussing his protege's sporting development than the gender debate. "At first she was just another athlete," Seme says one sunny morning in his office in Pretoria. "I saw her in 2007 and she was running like a novice." While she had raw talent - which was sufficient for her to win gold at the 2008 Commonwealth Youth Games in a time of 2min 4.23sec - Seme says, "Caster had no real rhythm. But I noticed she was taller than other girls in her age group and she was going to be much stronger." He began coaching her a year ago and looks thoughtful when asked if, back then, he believed that he was about to launch the career of a new world champion?

"I do short-term planning and programmes," he says, "but with Caster my hope was that, with the right training, she could make the final in Berlin. I thought she could try for a medal." The allegation that Semenya is the unwitting beneficiary of three times as much testosterone as other women runners has still to be proved but that hormonal imbalance was already evident at the start of the year. It did not, however, make her a world-beater. Instead, as Seme confirms, "after a few months, Caster said, 'Coach, these girls are beating me badly'. I said, 'don't worry'.

In the 800m, for the first lap, she was nearly leading. It was only in the second lap that she fell to the back. So we did no speed work. It was just endurance. We trained early in the morning, at five, and at four every afternoon. I had her running up and down this small hill behind the rugby field at the back of my office. Caster would do this for 30 minutes - up and down, up and down.

At the African Junior Championships in Mauritius in July, a lack of funding meant that Seme could not accompany Semenya. "I had to rely on the cellphone," he says. "I knew no junior could touch her but I was still surprised when she called me after the final and said she ran 1:56. I said, '1:58?' And she said, 'no, Coach, 1:56. And I didn't even have to work hard to win'." That breakthrough disconcerted the South African authorities - and the ASA president, Chuene, tricked Semenya into having a sex test.

Yet he refused to heed the advice of the team doctor, Harold Adams, that Semenya should be withdrawn from the world championships. I ask the coach: If the sex issue could be pushed to one side, how long might it take Semenya to smash the world record for the women's 800m which Jarmila Kratochvilova of the Czech Republic set in 1983 when she ran the distance in 1min 53.28sec? Seme laughs softly.

"She is 18 now, and we must always remember she is a woman. What if she gets a boyfriend? All these things can disturb her. I can't stop her doing this even if it will affect her mind as an athlete. In South Africa everyone is free now. When she's got a boyfriend, I can't stop her. If she can keep her focus, and she is allowed to run, she can do something special."

At another training session, a few days later, Semenya has eyes only for a group of footballers playing a frenetic game beneath the lightning and thunder. She flushes at the reminder that she was once a committed footballer who was forced to give up the sport because some boys in her village were uncomfortable playing with such an aggressive girl. "I gave up soccer," she sighs. "But I don't think I can ever stop running."

She looks forward to 2010 with real hope. "Next year is going to be busy," she insisted. "I want to win the African Juniors again. I'll still be a junior next year, so why not? And then there's the World Cup and the Commonwealth Games [in Delhi next October]. I even want to run cross-country - but I know Sponge will say no. But I want to give myself new challenges. I want to get better." That very human desire, to overcome challenges and to constantly improve, is the very least the world owes Semenya.

The IAAF ruling and the way in which it is handled by administrators both inside and outside South Africa, will go a long way to determining how a young woman might recover from a series of humiliations. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela, believes, as the head of the Task Team appointed to protect the athlete, that Semenya is "extremely relaxed ... she seems to have found her own way of dealing with this quagmire".

The truth, as ever, is probably more complicated; and a member of her training group admits that Semenya has spoken privately of her anger at how she has been treated - by the athletics authorities, politicians, the media and the world beyond. Yet, as we say goodbye, Semenya does not look like a woman in need of pity. Her handshake is as firm as ever, her laugh as forceful as before, but the hurt to which she has been subjected seems palpable. She smiles as I tell her that Seme is about to take me to the hill where she ran up and down for so many hours in those cold mornings before the world knew her name. "You should run up the hill," she cracks. "It does you good."

And with those words ringing in my head, I follow her coach. A steep mound of earth, rather than a proper hill, rises up before us. The photographer and I trundle up and down Semenya's hill. We eventually stand wheezing at its summit, watching the light fade from an African sky which shifts slowly from yellow to orange to a darkening red. I ask Seme what he imagines might happen when the IAAF finally makes its ruling and he smiles a sad smile.

"We hope for Caster. That's all we can do."

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