Ariel Levy Writes about Caster Semenya in The New Yorker

November 23rd, 2009 by Ben - Editor

How big is the Caster Semenya story? Very big – bigger even than those South Africans who have followed it closely might realize. The athlete’s controversial gender tests have been joked about on David Letterman; and now the Semenya saga has been written up for The New Yorker by Ariel Levy, who gained prominence of her own some years back with the publication of her book, Female Chauvinist Pigs.

While Levy’s piece is far from flawless – she hits many wrong notes of nuance, such as finding significance in the fact that Semenya’s former coach often uses a masculine pronoun when talking about her (a common SA speech habit that has nothing to do with gender) – the writer visits places and sets scenes that we have largely missed, so far.

Here’s Caster Semenya in The New Yorker:

The fastest runner in the club now is a seventeen-year-old named Andrew who recently became the district champion in the fifteen-hundred-metre event. The average monthly income for black Africans in Limpopo—more than ninety-seven per cent of the local population—is less than a thousand rand per month, roughly a hundred and thirty-five dollars. (For white residents, who make up two per cent of the population, it is more than four times that amount.) “I think I will go to the Olympics,” Andrew said, with conviction.
Joyce, a tiny girl in a pink sweater who is eighteen but looked much younger, was similarly optimistic. “I want to be the world champion,” she said, her voice so soft it was almost a whisper. “I will be the world champion. I want to participate in athletics and have a scholarship. Caster is making me proud. She won. She put our club on the map.”
Caster Semenya, the current world champion in the eight hundred metres, was a member of the Moletjie Athletics Club until a year ago. She was born in Ga-Masehlong, a village about fifteen miles from the track, and she was, Coach Sako said, “a natural.” Even before Semenya left Limpopo for college, in Pretoria, she had won a gold medal in her event at the 2008 Commonwealth Youth Games, in Pune, India, with a time of 2:04, eleven seconds behind the senior world record set by the Czech runner Jarmila Kratochvílová in 1983. “I used to tell Caster that she must try her level best,” Sako said. “By performing the best, maybe good guys with big stomachs full of money will see her and then help her with schooling and the likes. That is the motivation.” He added, “And she always tried her level best.” Semenya won another gold medal in July, in Mauritius, at the African Junior Athletics Championships, lowering her time by a remarkable seven and a half seconds, to come in at 1:56.72. This beat the South African record for that event, held by Zola Budd, and qualified Semenya for her first senior competition, the 2009 World Championships, in Berlin.