For years, international sports organizations have been policing women for “masculine” qualities — and turning their Olympic dreams into nightmares. But when Dutee Chand appealed her ban, she may have changed the rules.
ne day in June 2014, Dutee Chand was cooling down after a set of 200-meter sprints when she received a call from the director of the Athletics Federation of India, asking her to meet him in Delhi. Chand, then 18 and one of India’s fastest runners, was preparing for the coming Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, her first big international event as an adult. Earlier that month, Chand won gold in both the 200-meter sprint and the 4-by-400-meter relay at the Asian Junior Athletics Championships in Taipei, Taiwan, so her hopes for Scotland were high.
Chand
was raised in Gopalpur, a rural village in eastern India with only
intermittent electricity. The family home was a small mud hut, with no
running water or toilet. Her parents, weavers who earned less than $8 a
week laboring on a government-issued loom, were illiterate. They had not
imagined a different life for their seven children, but Chand had other
ideas. Now, as she took the five-hour bus ride to Delhi from a training
center in Punjab, she thought about her impending move to Bangalore for
a new training program. She wondered if she would make friends, and how
she’d manage there without her beloved coach, who had long been by her
side, strategizing about how best to run each race and joking to help
her relax whenever she was nervous. She thought little of the meeting in
Delhi, because she assumed it was for a doping test.
But
when Chand arrived in Delhi, she says, she was sent to a clinic to meet
a doctor from the Athletics Federation of India — the Indian affiliate
of the International Association of Athletics Federations (I.A.A.F.),
which governs track and field. He told her he would forgo the usual
urine and blood tests because no nurse was available, and would order an
ultrasound instead. That confused Chand, but when she asked him about
it, she recalls, he said it was routine
.
Source; New York Times
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