This chapter demonstrates how alternative requirements merely rendered gender verification moot. In 1992, the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) terminated all mandatory gender controls while the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) Medical Commission remained loyal to PCR testing, maintaining the procedure for the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics, 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and 1998 Nagano Olympics. As a result, the IOC experienced opposition throughout the 1990s from concerned physicians, national governments, and medically trained athletes. In 1999, the IOC Executive Board voted to stop testing. However, the medical commission did not relinquish complete control. Through suspicion-based checks, anti-doping techniques, and the Stockholm Consensus, Olympic authorities continued to uphold a binary notion of sex/gender and to promote Western norms of femininity. Thus, even though the IAAF and the IOC may have disagreed on the correct method, both organizations still believed that sex/gender control was crucial in elite sport.
This paper traces the history of two of the most important policies in sport: rules against drugs and 'ambiguous' athletes in women's events. Following the first twenty years of the two most important organizations in the creation of doping and sex teststhe IOC and the IAAFwe identify three distinct phases in the work of each organization's medical committee: (1) from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, the medical grounding of the committees and the influence of members' worldviews encouraged the groups to unquestioningly enlist scientific techniques to solve the problem of drug use and sex ambiguity; (2) from the early 1970s to 1980, administrative confusion underscored both committees, but scientific personnel gained legitimacy and furthered their own personal agendas; and (3) from 1980 to the mid-1980s, the seeds of diversion in sex and drug tests were sown. The central finding of this study is that the key stakeholders who shaped anti-doping and sex testing policies took for granted concerns regarding ethics and instead increasingly relied upon medical, scientific, and technical practices to define and control fairness in sport.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.