Earlier this week, at the Jamaican senior trials, Elaine Thompson won the women’s 100 metres final with a time of 10.70 seconds, the fastest in the world this year. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Olympic champion at the distance in 2008 and 2012, finished a distant second in 10.93s.
Fraser-Pryce has been struggling with a toe injury, but if she’s anywhere close to full fitness, she will contest Olympic gold with Thompson and Veronica Campbell-Brown, her compatriots. Those best placed to spoil hopes of a Jamaican 1-2-3 include the United States’ English Gardner and Tori Bowie and Ivory Coast’s Murielle Ahoure.
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But when these women line up for the heats in Rio de Janeiro, they will share the limelight with an athlete who has never even come close to breaking the 11-second barrier. Dutee Chand will be India’s first participant in the 100m since a 16-year-old PT Usha failed to make an impression in the heats in Moscow in 1980.
But, far more importantly, she has forced the sporting world to take a closer look at the grey area of gender testing.
As a 17-year-old, Dutee finished sixth in the 100m at the World Youth Championships. Progress thereafter was steady; until in 2014, the Indian authorities ruled that her hyperandrogenism – higher levels of testosterone than is “normal” – made her unfit to compete against other female athletes.
Dutee could either accept the ban or go in for expensive, and traumatic, hormone therapy.
Instead, she went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne. The CAS doubted whether high levels of testosterone in women necessarily translated into better athletic performance, and it told the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to suspend its hyperandrogenism regulation and provide more conclusive scientific evidence connecting “enhanced testosterone levels and improved athletic performance”.
In the year that she was prevented from running, Dutee became something of a cause celebre. The Toronto firm of Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg represented her pro bono, and after the CAS ruling, she released a statement through them: “What I had to face last year was not fair,” she said.
“I have a right to run and compete. But that right was taken away from me. I was humiliated for something that I can’t be blamed for. I am glad that no other female athlete will have to face what I have faced, thanks to this verdict.”
Dutee’s ordeal had come half a decade after the controversies surrounding South Africa’s Caster Semenya, who won silver in the 800m at the London Olympics in 2012. But where South Africa had rallied round Semenya, Dutee’s struggles were far from the front page in a country that hasn’t followed athletics seriously since Usha’s golden years in the 1980s.
Dutee may just be about to change that. By running 11.24s in a meet in Almaty, Kazakhstan on June 25, she comfortably bested the Olympic qualification time of 11.32 seconds.
One of seven children born to Chakradar and Akkaji, both weavers in the impoverished eastern Indian state of Orissa, Dutee is indebted to a small group of people that kept faith when her dreams were unravelling.
Her coach, Nagpuri Ramesh, was one of them, as was Pullela Gopi Chand, the badminton legend who let her train at his academy in Hyderabad after she left the National Institute of Sport in Patiala. The Anglian Medal Hunt Company, which represents her, helped with funding, and she will be based in Florida in the build-up to the games.
Usha missed out on an Olympic medal by 0.01 of a second in the 400m hurdles at Los Angeles in 1984. At the Asian level, she and the Philippines’ Lydia de Vega had some epic races. They set the standard until Sri Lanka’s Susanthika Jayasinghe came along to win 200m silver in Sydney (2000).
Dutee is unlikely to match Jayasinghe’s silver or even Usha’s fourth place. But just by being on the starting blocks in Rio, she will have made us look with renewed sensitivity at a subject that is far from black or white.
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