OLYMPIC swimming legend Sharron Davies has revealed that her children were threatened after she spoke out about transgender athletes competing in female sports.
Commenting on the ban on trans competitors in female events announced by the IoC today, she said it came after a decade of inaction on the issue.
She told GB News: “What is so disappointing is that, and I’m so pleased that Kirsty Coventry has done this, the IOC have done this, but she stood there and she said, we have listened to the scientific evidence. Now the scientific evidence has not changed in the last 10 years, it’s exactly the same.
“10 years ago, they didn’t listen to the scientific evidence, that women’s sport was so disposable, and it’s taken us 10 years to get back to this situation where where males are banned from female sport, transgender athletes are not banned, and that’s really important, that everybody understands that they’re still totally welcome to compete, as long as they’re competing with other people of the same biological sex.
“But DSD athletes have been a problem in Olympic sports now since the early 2000s and that’s been over 25 years. So it will be very good for women. If you remember back to the Rio Olympic Games, the 800 meters, the first three medallists on that were biological males. So the first female was fourth.
“It’s taken me 10 years and most of my career to just say biological sex in sport matters, and every single sane person knows that. And yet, that’s what happened in 2015 and whenever we bother to ask female athletes, they will always say, please bring back sex screening, which is what they’re going to do now.
“And it’s a very simple way. It’s once in a lifetime, because human beings cannot change their biological sex. It takes 10 seconds. And if you go to the Olympic Games and you obviously have to consent to dope testing, that is much more intrusive. So it’s a total red herring to say this is intrusive, because it’s not. It’s 10 seconds. It’s a cheek swab.”
She added: “I’ve often said that with almost getting to the point where we were going to take a woman being paralysed or killed before we were going to pay attention, and we nearly had that in Paris. And my feeling is it was criminal negligence, and that’s very much on the shoulders of Thomas Bach, who was the president at the time, Kirsty Coventry was on the committee.
“She could have spoken out. She didn’t, but she has spoken out now, our first woman president, and hopefully that means that she was going to stay strong and protect the women’s category going forward. I think it’s really important, though, that legislation is put in place with the IOC that this is never allowed to happen again.
“The first time it happened was way back in the 80s when we allowed East German athletes to be filled full of testosterone, and it took the IOC 20 years to fix that, and it’s taken them 25 years to fix this. So I think we need to make sure that they have better wording in their rules so that they can protect the female category properly going forward.
“I have friends that were forced behind three East Germans. His whole life would have been very different. And as I mentioned, the Rio 800 a Canadian lady called Bishop that nobody really remembers. And our own Lynsey Sharp, of course.
“People often remember her very tearful in that interview afterwards, who would have been an Olympic bronze medalist and that would have been the pinnacle of her sporting career, and that was taken away from her. So yes, I’d like to see that actually returned to them, but I don’t think that they will do it.”
On her reaction to the IoC rule change on trans athletes, she said: “10 years of my career just disappeared. My children were threatened. People would sometimes cross the road or try to avoid having conversation with me because I would talk to them about reality, and they didn’t want to talk about reality.
“But for me, it’s been worth it. I watched that generation miss out, and I couldn’t with all conscience just watch another generation miss out. I had to speak out, and if I would do it again, yeah, I’d do it all over again.”
