Gender Bending at the Olympics

In a day and age when athletes from all over the sports world will do anything they can and need to do to get a leg up on the competition, steriods and other performance enhancing drugs can run rampid. We all know this and the Olympics have always taken a strong stance of making sure its competitions are clean and fair events.

But throughout its history the Olympics have also paid a great deal of attention to making sure athletes, specifically men, weren't getting an unfair advantage by competing with women.

One would think that it was be clear that men compete against men and women compete against women. But history tells us it isn't always that straightforward.

The idea of testing for an athlete's gender is nothing new. The practice started in the 1960s when the Soviet Union and other Communist countries were suspected of entering males into female events. The initial tests were very primitive and consisted of female athletes parading naked to prove their womanhood. The tests modernized a bit in 1968 when the tests began to include hormonal testings.

The New York Times, which ran a story on the subject on July 30, said that no male was ever uncovered posing as a female through the tests to get an athletic advantage, but did report that throughout the years several female athletes have failed the test because of various genetic and medical conditions.

The practice of requiring the test to include all athletes continued through the 1990s, until in 1999, the practice was stopped.

Today the procedure still occurs but only for those athletes whose gender is questionable. The current form of testing, which will be used at this year's Olympics in Beijing requires female athletes in question to be examined by an endocrinologist, gynecologist, a geneticist and a psychologist, who exterior appearance, and genetic and hormonal makeups.

The Times said that only one gender flopping case exists since the modern Olympics took form in 1904. In 1936, German Dora Ratjen finished fourth in the women's high jumping event. It was later learned that Dora was really Hermann Ratjen, who was reportedly forced by Nazis to compete as a woman.