China ‘sets up Olympic sex determination lab’
They should subject the ‘male’ figure skaters to tests in 2010, too!
Mr Santhi Soundarajan? Ms Santhi Soundarajan?
Now, that’s an unusual headline! You don’t read stories like that every day! Yahoo reports..
China ‘sets up Olympic sex determination lab’
Olympic host Beijing has set up a sex determination lab to test female Olympic athletes suspected to be males, state media reported Sunday.
Experts at the lab, located at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, will evaluate dubious cases based on their external appearance and take blood samples testing sex hormones, genes and chromosomes, Xinhua news agency said.
Sex testing has been routine at the Olympics and other sports events for decades, triggered by fears that male athletes sought to cheat by posing as women.
Indian athlete Santhi Soundarajan was stripped of an Asian Games silver medal in 2006 after failing a gender verification test.
Also of interest:
One more nail in the coffin of Olympic respectability! The Olympics have become a pointless joke.
I like how they will test to see if a ‘woman’ athlete is secretly a man, but don’t seem to care if a ‘male’ athlete is secretly a woman!
Hence, my call to test the male figure skaters in Vancouver in 2010! Fair is fair, and I was always a bit leery of those guys, anyway.
That’s a very interesting point, V.V. I guess the trend is pretty much in only one direction. Besides, a woman passing for a man would still, even if enhanced, only have the basic strength of a woman, and so probably would not seriously challenge the legitimately male competitors, thus not skewing the results appreciably.
Oh I agree. I just think those figure skaters are a little dicey, that’s all! Hahah!