Olympic Gender Testing

By Lee | July 30th, 2008 | 4 Comments »

This is absolutely brilliant. Apparently, in an effort to prevent cheating and doping, they are now testing not only for steroids and performance enhancing drugs at the Beijing Olympics but they have an entire lab devoted to testing if supposed female athletes that physically look like men are actually males. As a matter of fact, this has been going on since the 1968 Mexico City games when the East German women were suspected of being men. Moreover, at the 1996 Atlanta games, 8-yes 8, women tested positive for being men! How great is that?! They were eventually cleared after a thorough “under the hood” inspection was conducted! This is just too funny, imagine being a woman and some chromosomal test concludes that you are a man and you then have to conclusively prove that you are a woman…I love it. I mean really, whose job is it to conclusively determine a persons sex and how does one qualify for that job? Somehow I don’t think that Amanda Beard was ever suspected of being a man-at least I hope!

So as the world counts down to the start of the Beijing Olympics and the US team has their facemasks to block the pollution from entering their precious lungs; rest comfortably in knowing that the female competitors who look like men that you will be watching will in fact have been tested to make sure that they are females. Haha. Jake, thanks for sending me that story-that’s just amazing stuff.