Abstract
In April 2018, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) announced new regulations governing the eligibility of certain female athletes with differences of sexual development accompanied by elevated levels of natural testosterone. Such women with testosterone levels above a specific threshold would be banned from competing as females unless they were to undergo medical intervention. In this paper, we examine key elements of the scientific basis offered by IAAF in support of the regulations, based on a subset of original performance data provided to us by IAAF. We identify significant flaws in the data used by IAAF leading to unreliable results. Further, these failures have not been corrected by IAAF or the academic journal which has published them, leading to a comprehensive failure of scientific integrity. We argue that the IAAF testosterone regulations are based on a flawed scientific foundation and that this case offers more general lessons for the sport governance community on the importance of upholding the standards of scientific integrity expected in other areas of policy and regulation.
Highlights
In April 2018, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) announced new regulations governing the eligibility of certain female athletes
Small differences in replication emphasized in italics N number of observations, SD standard deviation, H hurdles, SC steeplechase because the paper was produced in-house by IAAF researchers
As BG17 is both funded and conducted by IAAF in support of its own regulations, it is appropriate that independent scholars replicate or examine their work
Summary
In April 2018, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) announced new regulations governing the eligibility of certain female athletes. The regulations are the latest incarnation of “sex testing” in international athletics, an issue that the sport has struggled with for more than a half century (Pielke 2017). “peer-reviewed data and evidence from the field” is referenced to the following footnote in the regulations: Peer-reviewed data from the IAAF World Championships in Daegu (2011) and Moscow (2013) indicate that women in the highest tertile (top 33%) of testosterone levels performed significantly better than women in the bottom tertile (bottom 33%) in the following events: 400 m hurdles (top tertile, with mean T concentration of 1.94 nmol/L, outperformed bottom tertile, with mean T concentration of 0.43 nmol/L, by 3.13%; 400 m (top tertile, with mean T concentration of 7.39 nmol/L, outperformed bottom tertile, with mean T concentration of 0.40 nmol/L, by 1.50%; and 800 m (top tertile, with mean T concentration of 3.28 nmol/L, outperformed bottom tertile, with mean T concentration of 0.39 nmol/L, by 1.60%): Bermon and Garnier (2017), Serum androgen levels and their relation to performance in track and field: mass spectrometry results from 2127 observations in male and female elite athletes, Br J Sports Med 2017;0:1-7, additional material at http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/51/17/1309 This same footnote appears in the “Explanatory Notes/ Q&A” that accompany the regulations.. We document the unreliable data and findings of BG17, both of which are confirmed by reported results of BHKE18
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