Trying to stay fit in 1980s London in my 20s, I would sometimes go running — plodding, more like — in Hyde Park, which was near my apartment.
One chilly morning, as I puffed along, I saw another runner. He was circling the Round Pond, a park feature that is what its name suggests. Within a nanosecond of noticing him, without really watching him, it was obvious he was an athlete.
There was something uncanny in the way he glided friction-free over the ground. Then, he put on the afterburners, and I had never seen anyone like it. He was not simply an athlete but seemed almost of a different species. Could humans really do that?
I stopped, watched, and realized it was Sebastian Coe, at that time the best middle-distance runner on the planet. He held several world records, a handful of Olympic gold medals — the works.
To see such athletes is to marvel at their God-given gift, their stratospheric elevation above everyone else in what they do. It is this breathtaking and disciplined natural superiority that makes world champions and the best professional athletes so compelling. It is what makes them worth watching at all.
Coe was a sports hero back then, and now, as Lord Coe, head of World Athletics, is doing something brave, perhaps heroic again. He is taking decisive steps to protect the essential quality that billions of people see and love in sports. He intends to shield athletics from the cultural psychosis that has let men and boys compete in women’s and girls’ sports if they claim to be women or girls.
Although one should feel some sympathy for those genuinely afflicted with the psychological disorder that is gender dysphoria, this should not mean imposing their misunderstanding of the facts on the rest of society. That is what has increasingly happened for years, with the result that good but not great male athletes incapable of competing successfully in male sports have colonized female sports and filched prizes, accolades, and glory.
Perhaps the best-known example is that of swimmer Lia Thomas, who became an NCAA champion in women’s events, having ranked as low as 554th and no higher than 32nd competing against men. More recently, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif battered women in the boxing ring on the way to winning a gold medal at the Paris Olympic Games in 2024.
Such absurd consequences have long been lampooned. It is six years since the Babylon Bee, a satirical comedy outlet, ran a story under the headline, “Motorcyclist who identifies as a bicyclist sets cycling world record.”
The stain on our culture left by the success of the radical trans agenda is a dark one. It says much, and none of it good, that we have allowed egalitarian unfairness and dishonesty to govern the way we live and play.
Fortunately, the tide has turned against trans distortions, and normality is reasserting itself. Coe announced on Tuesday that all track athletes will have to submit to a cheek swab to confirm that they are not men before they are allowed to compete in women’s track events.
Coe said, “We’ll doggedly protect the female category and do whatever it takes to do it.” The swabs, which are expected to be used at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo in September, test for the presence of the SRY gene associated with Y chromosomes, which only men have.
Coe said he expects the test to resist all legal challenges, and it is to be hoped that he is right, for women’s sport should be shielded from the depredations it has suffered for more than a decade.
Although this should be celebrated, it is lamentable that it is even necessary. Each athlete will take the test only once, and it is largely noninvasive. But it is an example of the way aberrations inflicted by tiny minorities oblige the rest of us, who are known as “normies,” to express our antagonists’ arrogant weirdness, must jump through hoops to keep the world functioning properly.
TUBERVILLE IS THE SENATE CHAMPION NEEDED TO PROTECT FEMALE SPORTS
Another example of the screening of millions to protect them from militants is security checks at airports to make sure we are not Islamist suicide bombers. We must take off our shoes because a generation ago, in 2001, a 28-year-old English member of al Qaeda, Richard Reid, tried to detonate explosives hidden in his sneakers while on a flight from Paris to Miami.
Coe is modeling for the world how to restore fairness to sport. It is simple, and there is no need for society to tie itself in knots about it. But a generation from now, little girls who want to play elementary school soccer will probably have to prove with a cheek swab what everybody already knows: that they are, in fact, little girls. It may be necessary, but it is sad and frustrating that it is so.