NIALL KEILYgives his verdict on recent sporting events of his choosing...

Semenya is the only one who can hold her head high

THE SPORTING fate, indeed the life future of Caster Semenya remains in some sort of existential limbo as the international athletics federation (IAAF) concludes its council meeting in Monaco today apparently unable to produce a verdict.

It’s difficult to read the political runes as the IAAF continues to vacillate, but it has been one hell of a bizarre, rollercoaster year for the 18-year-old South African woman.

Twelve months ago, she was just a Commonwealth Youth Games champion, running outside 2 min 4 sec for the 800m. She was gauche, raw, unco-ordinated; yet tough, strong, determined.

Taken in for coaching by the skilled and sympathetic coach Michael Seme and given a bursary to study sports science at the University of Pretoria, her progress was incrementally swift. Then at the July’s African Juniors in Mauritius, she won in 1 min 56 sec. And it was at this point that factors outside her control intervened. The IAAF quietly asked that Semenya – robust, slim-hipped, husky-voiced – to be sex-tested. Athletics South Africa president Leonard Chuene tricked Semenya into doing the test; he subsequently lied when questioned about it.

In Berlin last August, she won the world championship 800m in 1 min 55.45 sec, and the IAAF machine went into overdrive, confirming the July test had been carried out.

The ASA and IAAF got into pass-the-blame-parcel games.

Chuene, the ASA and IAAF between them managed to cock up just about everything, and news leaks alleged first, that she had high levels of testosterone; secondly, that she is ‘intersex’. South African politicians joined the fray, jousting for pole position in defence of Semenya.

The IAAF finally confirmed that “gender verification test results” were to be examined by medical experts, and the Australian press reported that Semenya has evident female characteristics, but lacks ovaries or a womb.

The poor woman has been under serious personal pressure since July, and Pretoria granted her a delayed sitting of university exams to clear her head. She has kept up a dignified front, training with Seme, her coach and mentor, and the fellow athletes who don’t judge her, simply treat her as one of their own.

She kept trying to study, and this week she finally sat those exams.

Of all the main actors in this cruel athletics drama, she is undoubtedly the only one who can hold her head high at this point. She has done no wrong.

As always, there some silver linings. Just as Donal Óg Cusack’s honest courage will have a slow-burn beneficial impact for homosexuals who are struggling with their sexual orientation and relationships, the case of Mokgadi Caster Semenya has now helped focus attention on the difficulties of people who are born of indeterminate sex.

And just as the concerns of those of minority sexual orientations very often exercise the majority only when it is thrust in their faces, as it were, those of us blessed by life’s genetic lottery with ‘normal’ genitalia and reproductive innards tend to breeze along, taking our chromosome pairing (XX female, XY male) as a given, and unbothered by or unconcerned about the difficulties of those less fortunately endowed at birth.

It’s no small problem. The UK’s Gender Trust reckons as much as four per cent of the population is born without clear male or female identity. At least 30 variations of intersexuality have been identified.

For instance, Klinefelter’s syndrome (XXY or XXXY) hits one in a thousand boys who may have small testes, low testosterone and can develop breasts.

For another instance, Turner’s syndrome affects one in 10,000 girls who may have normal genitals but their ovaries do not develop, causing infertility.

Oh, by the way, nothing pisses off those with an intersex condition (ie physically, biologically or genetically outside the norm) more than use of the word ‘hermaphrodite’. It’s mythical.

Last word on Semenya has to go to her 80-year-old grandmother, who told the Guardian’s Donald McRae: “What can I do when they call her a man, when she’s really not a man? It is God who made her look that way.”

Whither the IAAF? It may be, having got Chuene and his cohort dumped out of office in South Africa, that IAAF president Lamine Diack is manoeuvring for some diplomatic outcome.

On the evidence to date, that would be a miracle.

Hard to sympathise as Johnson struggles

“I DON’T like the English. One at a time, I don’t mind them. I’ve loved some of them. It’s their collective persona I can’t warm to: the lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd of England.”

Sez who?*

Schadenfreude is a high-risk minefield to traverse, but let’s admit it, a great many of us non-English rugby folk have been taking no little innocent pleasure from the truly dire recent performances of the present England set-up. And the All Blacks still to come this afternoon. Tee hee.

Let’s examine the evidence. Some 18 months ago, the English union effected an ugly ousting of Brian Ashton, who’d just brought a team of yeomen to second place in the World Cup, and a similar finish in the Six Nations.

They went instead for Martin Johnson, a manager who’s never managed anything of consequence, gave him free rein to pick his own specialists and allowed a man who’s never coached at any level to become de facto head coach.

Shaun Edwards of Wasps/Wales wisely resisted an approach, but Brian Smith came in with a relatively threadbare record from London Irish to focus on attack. John Wells, Mike Ford, Jon Callard and Graham Rowntree stayed on to do forwards, defence, kicking and scrum, respectively.

All of this with the approval of supremo Rob Andrew, whose Teflon survival skills are, thus far, not less than remarkable. And Johnson installed as captain Steve Borthwick, a decent secondrow with no evident leadership qualities.

Performance, and some autumn scorelines can usually be discounted if progress is evident, but it has been witheringly poor. No natural unit leaders have emerged in the team, Smith has failed to persuade the threequarters even to pass consistently well.

Worst of all, Rowntree and Jon Callard spent the Argentina game last weekend using maor uisce access to spoon-feed the players their on-pitch instructions. (Compare, and contrast that with Ireland’s fitful but coolly mature show against the Australians.) The underlying problem, of course, is Martin Johnson, a man bereft of emotional intelligence.

He is thus severely handicapped in trying to become an effective manager – not least because of furious and increasingly vituperative scrutiny of the English media.

Of course, any gloating at England’s disarray from this side of the Irish Sea carries with it the baggage of hubris under the sword of nemesis.

But it’s hard to sympathise when the presiding officer on the wallowing ship is the Neanderthal browed one.

And we are entitled to recall with no little anger the Martin Johnson who as England captain in Lansdowne Road, deliberately and single-handedly put President Mary McAleese out to grass.

( *Much as I’d like to claim it, the quoted first paragraph is the verdict of AA Gill, television critic, restaurant reviewer and wordsmith, and English to the core. He has clearly heard Twickenham’s Chariot.)

Rugby Footnote ; At the weekend England played in baffling purple, and Wales turned out in a bilious shade of yellow. Stade Francais-disease is clearly contagious.

The Welsh ‘link’ to Owen Glendower was tenuous, to say the least, and the English allusion to ‘royal’ purple equally iffy.

It’s naked commercialism, and it’s making supporters truculent and cynical, as pockets nowadays cannot stretch to purchase every new change-strip offering.

By and large, the IRFU has spared us on the greensward catwalk front.

Still, on Sunday in Croker, I heard much complaint in the Cusack at the sheer volume of the tannoy muzak, the patronising idiocy of the stadium commentator — and touchline ‘flags’ have now become stiff, but of course sponsored rectangles that give supporters no idea whatever of how the wind is swirling through the stadium.

Blazers, get a grip.

A test debut with a difference

THE MILD alarm among GAA worriersprompted by last week's Pembroke PR survey of public attitudes to some of our sports was mainly based on the apparent finding that Gaelic football came in third behind soccer and rugby in our public esteem.

Lies, damned lies and survey stats can be deceptive, however, and as Seán Moran of a nearby parish pointed out this week, the Gah is securely embedded in this country, soccer now faces into a post-Paris trough, and rugby can only dream about a year to match 2009.

All of which leads us back to last weekend’s big anniversary in India: 20 years since Sachin Tendulkar made his Test debut. They didn’t gentle him in, either, selecting him for a tour to Pakistan, a merciless crucible even for a prodigious talent.

What I’d forgotten was the courage he discovered on that tour, a capacity to cope with pressure that matched near-perfect technique.

Just imagine, he was 16: in the final Test the bowler dug one in short, breaking the nose of the helmetless Tendulkar, but he waved treatment away, and batted on for 57 runs, literally bloodied but utterly not for bowing.

Pressure? In public profile terms, he is revered, adored, worshipped to the point of mania. Imagine an Irish amalgam of Shefflin, O’Driscoll, Given and Peter McVerry, and such a paragon wouldn’t even come close to the levels of veneration and sheer pestering Tendulkar has to endure in Mumbai.

Final Straw

LAST WEEK Dubliner Eoin Morgan,of Middlesex and now the England Twenty20 team, drove his side to a one-run Duckworth-Lewis win over South Africa in Johannesburg with an unbeaten 85 – including a pulled six that the Telegraph's Scyld Berry described as passing a five-storey building at roof height, after the ball had left the ground.

Now, I well understand how first Ed Joyce (a cousin whose exploits I savour), and then Morgan went the Middlesex and England route in order to temper themselves at the highest level.

I’ve got past cringing at the ‘Ed Joyce of England’ bit, but it still grates to read or hear of ‘the English batsman Eoin Morgan’.

Does this make me an unreconstructed paddy?

RTÉ'S DES Cahill segued neatly on Thursdaymorning radio from the Parisian Sturm und Drang into his fond hope that Rory McIlroy might do well enough in Dubai to top the European money list.

It was neat because the juxtaposing counterposed the relative mores, the core values, of sports that both command much public interest and attention (not to mention grossly disproportionate reward for those at the top table).

At the heart of golf is strict observance of sometimes arcane rules.

It is self-policed, and occasional examples of highly-pressured professionals calling a penalty on themselves for a nudge of the ball – in rough where only they could possibly have seen the transgression – surprises nobody in the game.

And so back to Paris. What would people expect?

At the top of the game you’ve got the likes of Sepp Blatter, who wrote the rules as he went along in order to seed and thus favour the big-ticket nations of France, Portugal and Russia (and now has two of his three pets through the play-offs).

Beside him, Fifa has Michel Platini, a dapper Richelieu to Blatter’s plodding Bismarck.

And thus to Wednesday. Monsieur Fair Play stuns the ball with his forearm, then positively caresses it with his hand before setting up France’s decisive goal in Paris.

I repeat: What’d anyone expect, given a game run by Blatters and played, let’s be blunt about it, mainly by diving and cheating bowsies?

IN A week when even the Danesadmitted that next month's Copenhagen climate-change conference will drift towards yet another inter-nations fudge, came the news that the national golf association is exercised by the issue of lost golf balls. No, not how to find them. It is upset that many hundreds of millions of the expensive yokes are lost worldwide, and it takes an estimated millennium for them to fully biodegrade. And as they decompose, they release high levels of toxicity that damages proximate flora and threatens local fauna.

Really, you couldn’t make this stuff up. I reckon myself that the Danish Golf Association folk really need to get out more.