LOCKER ROOM:The world athletics body must balance the needs of a young national hero with the obligation to be fair to her fellow-competitors, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

AS A columnist – even a slumdog columnist living here in the intellectual shantytown that is the back page – there is a duty to have a position on absolutely everything. The union insists on it. In the great universe of sport a sparrow shall not fall without us columnists taking positions on the dubious trajectory which preceded its terminal splat.

(Fall? Was it a dive? Is this what Eduardo has taught the little sparrows? Was the sparrow pushed? Was there drink involved? Kinky sex games gone wrong? Ron Atkinson? What about the ‘on the decline of sparrows as a force’ etc etc). It helps too if you can have not just a position but an accompanying rise in your blood pressure which you can express through the medium of bad prose. This gift of being angry 52 times a year at least is what separates the truly gifted columnist from the journeyman hum and haw merchant or the lame humorist. Even those of us ambidextrous types who do our humming and hawing through the medium of lame humour yearn for some surge of strident anger with which to add a little bile to the back page.

Every so often, though, a subject comes along which lends itself only to humming and hawing. Leaving aside the unfortunate leaks and the exquisite sensitivities, what would you do with a girl like Caster Semenya? It is impossible to have any (oh, God) hard and fast opinions on a situation which shifts its moral fulcrum every time you look at it from a different angle.

Perhaps the only thing we can be sure of is the IAAF are as supremely ill-equipped as the rest of us for dealing with a situation which requires them to balance the needs of an 18- year-old national hero against the obligations of fairness to all the other national heroes who compete in the 800 metres.

The rules on testosterone ratios which were imposed to police sport against drug cheats have always been a little blurry at the border and have necessarily erred on the side of generosity. The natural ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone in the body should be 1:1. The current world permissible ratio as laid down by WADA is 4:1 and, in cases where this ratio is exceeded, carbon isotope ratio tests are capable of detecting the fingerprints of synthetic testosterone as opposed to the testosterone we generate naturally through what we eat.

And the rules are there for a reason. To protect other competitors and to protect the integrity and dignity of sport because without those things sport is meaningless.

What’s to be done, though, if through some genetic quirk a female competitor is born with the internal equipment to produce abnormal amounts of testosterone within her body? The Sydney Daily Telegraph, which carried the purported leak from the tests performed on Caster Semenya, claims the tests prove she has no womb or ovaries, but internal male testes which are producing extraordinary amounts of testosterone.

There is a duty, first of all, to the tender sensibilities of the 18-year-old girl involved in the current case. The manner and volume of the current inquiries and leaks concerning her physiological make-up have been unacceptable in a situation where there is no suggestion of doping or cheating.

An otherwise normal life, crowned by the fulfilment of a World Championship win, has turned into a nightmare from which it is difficult to see any escape. The word which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald will always hang like a captioned verdict over Caster Semenya if and when people see her compete again.

Caster Semenya has acted with dignity throughout and the spikily protective manner in which the people of South Africa have reacted to the controversy is understandable. Over the weekend the sports minister, Makhenkesi Stofile, waded in saying it would be unjust if Semenya was precluded from competing as a woman and that any attempt to remove her world title from her would mean “a third world war.” What, though, to do in the long term? If Caster Semenya were a doping cheat whose ratio turned up a figure as off the scale of 18:1 the clean competitors in her event would have the right to expect to be protected. Gender tests are nothing new in athletics and the old East German sports machine specialised in chemically turning young women into men.

One German sports physician described Olympic sport as “a gigantic biological experiment carried out on the human organism” over the past 100 years.

It was only right and proper that stringent doping laws should attempt at least to protect clean athletes from dirty rivals and to protect dirty athletes from themselves. How many doping cheats have we heard from down through the years who have claimed that the freakish toxicity found within their body was just a natural thing caused by their toothpaste or too much sex or watching television etc, etc? We protect the sport and other competitors from those we find guilty.

What to do, though, when nature just hop- skips an innocent competitor to the place where every cheat wants to get to? What to do when, through no fault of her own, a young woman winds up with genetic advantages which are off the scale?

Most great athletes come to this earth with some sort of genetic advantage. Sportspeople and scientists will debate long and hard the reasons for the dominance of Kenyans and Ethiopians in middle distance running. Are there genetic or environmental reasons for their extraordinary dominance? There is a sensitivity about the subject of racial biology which has been notably absent from the current debate about gender biology but the same assumptions underline a lot of the debate from the forlorn old notion that black fast bowlers were, for genetic reasons, impossible for the solid white cricketer to deal with, to the notion that white men can’t jump.

There is no doubt black dominance of athletics in particular and sport in general has prompted many quiet and often ill-informed discussions and arguments as to whether there is a biological superiority at play. Nobody on either side of the debate suggests a return to mono racial sport, however.

What to do with Semenya, though? Are her genetic advantages any more unfair than those accruing to a seven-foot ten-inch basketball player or an extraordinarily supple gymnast? Does her innocent arrival at a place where cheaters aspire to go automatically make her presence in a race unfair?

Sympathy for her is easy right now. How would we feel though if we added some partisanship to the mix? If Sonia O’Sullivan back in the day was among the also-rans behind a Caster Semenya, not once but again and again. Would we be threatening world war three? When Sonia was running we had hard and fast opinions about many of her rivals, including one hirsute character who had such a crop of facial stubble that her nickname among the other athletes was a play on her surname and on the word beard.

Caster Semenya’s case raises more questions than there are answers. The IAAF, used to being cast in the role of flat-footed policemen, find themselves in an odd cleft where they have to achieve a balance between humanity towards an innocent young athlete and fairness to her rivals.

We columnists who are supposed to have a position on everything can only hum and haw till we see what position the IAAF takes. Then, whatever it is, we’ll confidently denounce it.