Semenya stays silent after victory as sadness follows gold

 FOR the macho man there are few worse insults than being labelled a girl. But imagine winning the women's 800m world title and then being called a bloke.

Welcome to the strange and ever weirder world of Caster Semenya.

QUESTION MARKS: As controversy swirled around her, Caster Semenya delivered gold for South Africa in the 800m at the World Championships in Berlin

With near perfect timing, just three hours before she was due to run in the biggest race of her life, athletics world governing body, the IAAF, declared she was the subject of an ongoing investigation after question marks arose over her gender.

That investigation would be concluded ‘within weeks', they said.

Against that storming maelstrom, Semenya produced a front running display to win the world title.

Judged on just the merit of the performance, it was impressive stuff but her choice of celebration, flexing her muscles towards the world's media, could be viewed as both defiant and ill-judged.

However, her rise to prominence has been shocking, she has taken eight seconds off her personal best in the last 12 months and this is a sport where eyebrows are all too quickly arched.

Semenya won the African junior title just three weeks ago in the quickest time this year, tonight she lowered that mark further.

Her case is certainly worthy of further investigation, the improvements made are improbable, though not impossible, to even the untrained eye.

OVERSHADOWED: Great Britain's Jenny Meadows claimed third but refused to give her thoughts on the gold medallist (Getty Images)

But let us not forget that whatever the result of the ongoing gender test, Semenya is still only 18.

It was little surprise then that the new world champion did not turn up to her winners press conference at the Olympiastadion tonight.

And the IAAF - clearly caught on the hop as this story broke around them - were quick to defend their handling of the matter.

“We have a winner, a second and a third,” said IAAF general secretary Pierre Weiss.

“Tomorrow we will have a medal ceremony. At the moment, this lady is a lady. We have heard what the media is reporting and the investigation is on-going and will another take two to three weeks.

“Then we'll see after the results what we'll do. Two weeks ago this lady was totally unknown, she only ran under two minutes for the first time in July.

“It was decided that it would be unfair to put her through a press conference, jointly taken by IAAF and South African. She will not be appearing.

“Once she had qualified for the final, we began to reflect on the situation and decided then that she should not attend the press conference if she won.”  

Gender testing was formally scraped in the 1990s and has been replaced by a more complex and allegedly reliable system - although Weiss was not keen to elaborate on the science.

“The methods involved are confidential. We will explain everything when we announce the decision," he added.

“In the past the tests were not 100 per cent reliable so the system in the 1990s wasn't as good. It is now a very complex process.”