On the Rules of Fair Play and Legal Conflicts in High Performance Sports

Abstract

At the present stage of medical technologies development, high-performance sports have faced serious difficulties. Its rules and fundamental principles not only fail to keep pace with changes in law and society, but also sometimes contradict themselves. High-performance sports is a balance between the basic rights to selfdetermination as a person of a certain gender and the rules of fair play. The reality is that in order to win sports competitions, people go to extreme measures, for example, changing their biological gender. In this situation, determining the persons (men, women) with whom an athlete should compete becomes not such a simple task, there is legal uncertainty, which sometimes does not provide an opportunity to clearly determine what gender a particular athlete is. The unequal struggle or “death of women’s sports” as such, as well as concerns that men who become women gain an unfair advantage in women’s competitions and the increasing number of cases of participation of transgender athletes in international competitions, prompted the authors of the article to analyze the foreign experience of legal regulation of the participation of such persons in high-performance sports. What is more important: the right to self-determination and self-acceptance as a person of the opposite sex or the rules of fair play? If there are special and general rules of legal regulation, a normative act of a private nature is applied, defining the “self-determination of a person” as a dominant in sports matters. But is everything so clear in high-performance sports? Legal conflicts and ambiguous legal situations (legally significant circumstances) are considered within the framework of this article.