World Athletics Council decides on Russia, Belarus and female eligibility

Track and field banned transgender athletes from international competition today, while adopting new regulations that could keep Caster Semenya and other athletes with differences in sex development from competing.

In a pair of decisions expected to stoke outrage, the World Athletics Council adopted the same rules as swimming did last year in deciding to bar athletes who have transitioned from male to female and have gone through male puberty. No such athletes currently compete at the highest elite levels of track.

Another set of updates, for athletes with differences in sex development (DSD), will impact 13 athletes, WA President Sebastian Coe said. They include Semenya, a two-time Olympic champion at 800 meters who has been barred from that event since 2019.

Semenya and others had been able to compete in events outside the restricted range of 400 meters through one mile, but will now have to undergo hormone-suppressing treatment for six months before competing to be eligible.

Konstanze Klosterhalfen of Germany competes during the Athletics - Women's 10,000m Final on day 5 of the European Championships Munich 2022 at Olympiapark on August 15, 2022 in Munich, Germany. (Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images)

Semenya has been trying to compete in longer events. She finished 13th in her qualifying heat at 5,000 meters at world championships last year.

To compete at next year’s Olympics, she would have to undergo hormone-suppressing treatment for six months, something she has said she will never do again, having undergone the treatment a decade ago under previous rules.

Russia and the Olympics

The World Athletics Council also kept its ban on Russian athletes in international events in place “for the foreseeable future.” It’s a move that goes directly against the International Olympic Committee’s efforts to find a way for Russian athletes to compete as neutrals in upcoming events.

World Athletics will form a working group to determine under what conditions Russians might return to international competition, but for now, there is no apparent pathway.

The move came on the same day that World Athletics finally lifted a seven-year suspension of Russia’s track federation for a doping scandal that dates back a decade.

Though the federation is back in good standing so long as it adheres to nearly three dozen “special conditions,” that move did nothing to change the reality that Russians will not be allowed at track meets for at least several months, if not years.