Wed 24 Aug 2016 In: International News View at Wayback View at NDHA
South African gold medal athlete Caster Semenya has returned home to a heroes welcome and presented her wife, Violet Raseboya, with the medal at Johannesburg’s international airport. Getty Images ”It’s fantastic to come home to such a welcome. I am not one to be filled with too much emotion‚ but now I am very happy”, said the Olympic athlete. A gold medalist in the women’s 800m race, Semenya has been on the receiving end of an intense and extremely invasive media frenzy because she has hyperandrogenism - higher testosterone levels than the women she competes against in the 800m. She does not self-identify as intersex. The International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) has been investigating her for seven years, since she won the African junior championship title in 2009 and went on to win at the World Championships. The term hyperandrogenism has been thrust upon her after she was forced to undergo testing as if to somehow classify whether or not she is male or female. Leading up to the Rio Olympics, the president of the IAAF Sebastian Coe called for her to take hormone-suppressing drugs in order compete as she did in the London Olympics, when she won a silver medal. South Africa has rallied behind their champion, showing support in the height of a media frenzy, using the hashtag #handsoffcaster. At a press conference following her win she spoke of her win saying "It's all about loving one another," said the 25-year-old South African. "It's not about discriminating people. It's not about looking at people [and] how they look, how they speak, how they run. "You know, it's not about being muscular. It's about sports. When you walk out of your apartment, you think about performing. You don't think about how your opponents look. You just want to do better. I think the advice to everybody is to go out and have fun."
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Wednesday, 24th August 2016 - 2:36pm