EP. 61: The Female Athlete: Fairness, Inclusion and Performance w/Kerry McGawley, PhD

A conversation with coach Kerry McGawley, PhD. She is a Professor at Mid Sweden University with a broad research agenda in the female athlete, and menstruation effects on training, and racing performance. She is a coach and 2x age group world champion in triathlon. Professor McGawley engages in a science centered conversation around the protected women’s category in sport and explanation and implications of athletes with DSD.  

We talk about the paper she co-authored with other scientists and unpacks the evidence and critique of the IOC’s 2021 framework aimed at providing governing bodies with guidelines for fairness and inclusion.  

Professor McGawley gives her dissemination of a common rebuttal regarding performance advantage (i.e., Phelps advantages).  

Finally, Professor McGawley provides listeners with the key considerations that athletes/coaches should be aware of regarding the menstrual cycle, and the impact on female athlete training, racing and performance. She also comments on contraception influences. 

About Kerry McGawley, PhD
https://www.miun.se/en/personnel/m/kerrymcgawley/  

Kerry McGawley, PhD Instagram:
https://instagram.com/kerrymcgawley
 
Kerry McGawley, PhD Twitter/X:
https://x.com/KerryMcGawley  

Kerry McGawley, PhD  Co-Authored Paper:

The International Olympic Committee framework on fairness, inclusion and nondiscrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations does not protect fairness for female athletes https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sms.14581  

Follow Us:
Facebook: https://Facebook.com/EventHorizon.Tv
X: https://x.com/EventHorizonTv
Instagram: https://instagram.com/eventhorizon.tv
YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/EventHorizonTv

Support Us:
https://Patreon.com/Endurance
https://paypal.me/EnduranceExperience    

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The intersection of endurance, sport, health, fitness and light, challenging
conventional ideas and empowering people with the science of self
propelled motion. This is The Endurance Experience podcast hosted by
Tony Ridge.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to the Endurance Experience Podcast. I'm Tony Rich. This
is the season sixth finale of The Endurance Experience and
in this episode, I wanted to revisit the discussion of
fairness and inclusion in sport. This was a widely discussed

(00:44):
and debated topic throughout the recently concluded Paris Olympics and
Para Olympics. It's been a little under a year now
since we heard from in her memoir The Athlete castor Semenya.

(01:07):
She released a book in her own words titled The
Race to Be Myself, and I think it would be
appropriate for me to read a passage from her book
in order to tee up this podcast. This is from

(01:30):
her chapter eleven, which she titles The Troubles Begin. I
went to the hospital alone. A nurse met me in
the waiting area and escorted me to a patient room.
There were two chairs and an examining table with what
I now know are stirrups. I'd never seen those before.

(01:54):
She directed me to a chair. Soon, an older black
man entered and introduce himself as a doctor Oscar Shimani,
a gynecologist. Yes, hello, what's this, I pointed to the table.
I am here for a doping test. Doctor. Doctor SHERMANI

(02:15):
sat in the chair across from me. He looked at
me and brought his thumb and forefinger up to the
bridge of his nose. No, miss semenya, did these people
not tell you what you are here for? You are
not here for a doping test, Doctor SHERMANI, unlike Doctor Lane,
didn't talk around the truth. Doctor Lane was previously the

(02:39):
psychologist that came to see her. He came straight out
and leveled with me. Look, I'm going to be honest
with you. It is my duty as a doctor to
do no harm. I have been asked to perform a
gender test on you. It is your right to refuse
to take this test. I knew what the word gender meant,

(03:03):
and so I wasn't bothered. I felt something more like annoyance.
Ah this thing again, O K, Then what's the problem.
Do the gender test? Doctor. Let's not waste time. I've
a plane to catch a gold medal to win. Miss Semenia,

(03:24):
this isn't as easy as you think. I'm required to
do a full examination. O K, then do it, I said,
what do you want from me? You need to see
my things. I sat further back in the chair and
crossed my arms. Doctor Shimani took off his glasses. Miss Semenia,

(03:50):
are you a boy? I laughed. I'd been accused of
this before. I have nothing to hide, Doc, I'm a girl.
I have only girl parts. Do you have a wife?
You know what a vagina looks like. If you know
what a vagina looks like, that's what you're going to

(04:12):
see here. Then I undressed, put on a hospital gown,
laid on the examining table and spread my legs. For
the first time in my life to another human being.
Doctor Shamani looked at my privates. He never touched or
asked me any questions during the exam. I couldn't tell

(04:34):
from the expression on his face what he was thinking.
At some point, I felt the need to say something
and don't try anything funny with me. Doc, I may
be a girl, but I will beat you down like
a man. Doctor SHRMANI chuckled. He brought out a sonogram

(04:55):
wand and placed it on my lower belly. He drew
blood and then the exam was over. Once he was finished,
I got dressed and we spoke as two humans, not
as doctor and patient. I could tell that he was
a good man, Castor. I am going to tell you

(05:15):
the truth here. You are not built like most other women.
I know you already know that, but these people are
looking for a specific issue, a hormone in your blood
called testosterone. Both men and women have this hormone, but
you may have a higher level of it than the

(05:39):
sports people allow for your gender. I am sorry. I
think the results will show this is the situation with you, Castor.
As a fellow African, I have to tell you, I
think the chances of you running in the World Championships
are very low. I just sat there and listened. He

(06:01):
went on to mention chromosomes and x'es and y's and
how sometimes there are certain functions that are blocked in
the body when there is a hormonal imbalance. The words
and science were beyond me at the time. I never
heard these terms before, and I didn't hold them in

(06:25):
my mind. Still, I understood he was saying that even
if I was born a girl. I was different because
of this hormone. He was right. I didn't have the
curves African women are famous for, and I still hadn't
gotten a period. Just for contexts, she was eighteen years

(06:46):
old at the time of this realization. But those things
didn't matter to me. I dealt in practicalities. There were
plenty of female athletes whose bodies resembled mine and who,
like me, had not once had a period. They were
there with me at the university and in the running circuits.

(07:09):
I'd sometimes overhear their conversations. If I had a quote
unquote condition, then I had it. It didn't change the
fact that I sat down to pee like every other girl.
Once he finished, I spoke, it is God's will, Doc,
It's a part of life, this thing you say I

(07:31):
may have. If I have it, God gave it to me.
I've been able to live my life and be successful
with it. I don't see why this would be a
problem now. I've been running in the system this whole time.
All I know is I am a girl. I don't
have a penis. You saw that with your own eyes.

(07:52):
That's all I know. You can finish your tests if
they say I can't run. Then I can't run, but
they haven't stopped me yet. Thank you for your time.
End of passage. I do highly recommend you read her book.
We finally heard from her in her words about her

(08:13):
life the discovery of the condition. As you heard at
age eighteen, that condition being five alpha reductes deficiency what
is known as a DSD or a disorder or difference

(08:35):
in sexual development. And as you've heard, someone like Cascasomenia
can make it through to adulthood and they and their
parents may not be aware that they possess the DSD,
which may include one characteristic of pubertal development with testosterone

(08:57):
in the male typical ring. And as you know, the
testosterone ranges between males and females are so vast they
don't even overlap. In sport, we have great empathy for
these athletes, as you heard from Castasomenia. They are training hard,
competing hard, living their life in their own body. Yet

(09:23):
to no fault of their own, they become the center
in a debate between inclusion and fairness in sport. You
may recall that I had two podcasts touching on this topic.
The episode two with the Head of the Human Performance
Lab at brandeis a PhD. Maria de boof Meira and

(09:46):
my episode thirty nine with Joanna Harper, who's a scientist
and a trans athlete herself and advisor to the IOC
for this season finale podcast, I want to find in
another expert who is going to speak with a science
centered expertise, and my guest did not disappoint. She is

(10:12):
Professor Kerrie macgali. She's a PhD and a sports scientist
in the Mid Sweden University Swedish Winter Sports Research Center
in the Department of Health Sciences. She has a broad

(10:34):
research agenda including the female athlete and menstrual cycle phases
and implications on performance, including menstruation health literacy. She also
has published research in athletes health to underpin performances and

(10:55):
arms cycling mechanical and physiological effects, among other research projects.
Her doctoral thesis was on the application of the critical
power constructed to endurance exercise and she has a vast
library of journal articles, published work and citations. And if

(11:21):
you want to be even more impressed, she herself has
been recently two time age group World champion in triathlon.
I have linked her complete bio in the show notes.
We have a conversation about DSD athletes and the implications

(11:42):
to the question of fairness and sport. We talk about
the women's category of sport and how it's protected, and
other issues related to the protection of the women's category
of sport, including the governing bodies dealing with the issue

(12:04):
of trans athletes competing in the women's category. Professor mcgauley
co authored a paper with other scientists which was a
response to a position paper on the IOC's framework. She
talks about that paper and some of the findings. You
can also find a link to that paper in the

(12:25):
show notes. We talk about the common rebuttal to the
question of unfair advantage, namely what I've referred to with
the Phelps principle, i e. Why do we seem to
only care about unfair advantages in certain cases but not
cases like Michael Phelps or Hussein Boat. Professor mcgauley gives

(12:49):
her critique of that rebuttal. Then we switch gears and
talk about key considerations that athletes and coaches should be
aware of regarding the menstrual cycle and the implications on
female athletes for training, racing, and performance. I felt that
it was absolutely necessary to get Professor McAuley's expertise on

(13:16):
that subject. This was a great conversation. A quick note,
we had some audio instability somewhere around the first twenty
five minutes or so, and it passes, so bear with
me on that. And I would just invite people who
feel like they have this issue all figured out approach

(13:37):
the conversation with an emotionally detached posture, regardless of where
you think you may stand. As we have science and
evidence based conversations, you just may come out of the
other end learning a little something more to say in
my afterward and now I bring you Professor Carrie mcgaully.

(14:08):
All right, I am on with Professor Kerry mcgauley. Thanks
for coming onto the podcast.

Speaker 3 (14:13):
Thanks a lot for inviting me.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
So I've known of you for some time, and I
know you have a background as a sports scientist and
an expertise and the female athlete, and like myself, you're
a coach of athletes and also a pretty stellar athlete.
I come to understand as well yourself. You like a triathlon,

(14:39):
long course triathlon. So I wanted to have a conversation
and here we are post the Olympics and Paralympics, and
there's been a lot of conversation about the topic of
fairness in sport and fairness in the women's category, and
so I want to talk about that and get your
expertise to unpack some of the science. And I said

(15:02):
to us, I really need someone who understands the science
and can explain it to listeners, and I thought of you,
and so I really appreciate your time. So I want
to talk about that, the DSD athlete question that came
up during the Olympics, and even the questions around the

(15:24):
women's category and trans athletes. And I would be remiss
if I didn't take the chance to get some of
your expertise on menstruation and training of the female athlete
in the menstrual cycle and the implications of that. But
first I will have introduced you properly in my pre

(15:48):
recorded preamble. But if you can just high level give
our listeners some introduction in your expertise and perhaps your
research agenda, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
Sure, so maybe just briefly. I guess I've been working
in sport for twenty years or so as a researcher.
I've gone through a kind of academic process of doing
a PhD and then postdoctoral studies. I moved to Sweden
in twenty eleven. I'm from the UK, from down south

(16:24):
in England, so I moved to Sweden in twenty eleven
and I currently I continue to work there now. So
I work at Midsweet University and I started off as
a postoc there for a couple of years before I
got like, I think what you'd call tenure, like a
permanent position. And now yeah, as you said, I'm a
full time professor. So I've always my background is really

(16:47):
applied performance sport. I would say I'm a very applied
sports scientist. I've worked across quite a few different sports.
I started off with a background myself in soccer, and
in my early studies were in team sports soccer, and
then I kind of became more expert in endurance sport.
When I moved to Sweden, I started working with cross
country skiing and bathlon. So I lived up in the

(17:10):
in Ustashund, which is the winter hub for those endurance sports.
So that was learning a lot of Yeah, I guess
new things around well culture, training, philosophies, but also new
sports and new types of athletes. I've always been very
keen and careful to include women in my studies. I've

(17:30):
got a physiology background, and if you read a lot
of physiology papers, you'll read a section in the method
section that says that, you know, women or females were
excluded from this study due to their variations in cyclical hormones.
And I always thought, well, that's a bit strange, because
then we won't know anything about women. I guess that's
something I've always been aware of, but it's only in

(17:52):
recent years, probably last five years or so, that I've
really focused on looking more closely at the effects of
mentrual cycle, how that's impacting athletes, how it's impacting their
training and performance. And I work kind of practically as
a consultant as well with a company called Oraco, as

(18:12):
well as my UNDERBA academic career. So yeah, lots of
threat of my applies background from team sports to endurance sports,
male and female athletes young and always the kind of
top teenior level. And then, like you said, like more
of a recent specific focus on of the female athlete
and everything that that entails, specifically around kind of different

(18:33):
text form booms compared to men, and that's naturally led
a little bit to Yeah, this topic that you're talking
about as well in terms of DSD and brands women
in sport and you know beds picking up at sports
myself and being a scientist and being very keen and
aware of the importance to me of fairness and scientific fact.

Speaker 2 (18:56):
Yes, yes, thank you, and and so you know, let's
talk about this because when the Olympic, the Olympics was
going on, we had the discussion about there was some
boxers that there was postulated that there was a DSD.
We don't know all the detail, but I do know

(19:19):
that there's a great deal of confusion among people on
social media and the comment sections, and I realized that
people really don't understand a lot about sport, how sport works,
or the concept of fairness, and particularly know even less

(19:39):
about the concept of DSD athletes. I mean this was
brought up during the cast As Semnia issue back in
twenty I think it was twenty nineteen where that really
started to gain a lot of awareness. But why don't
we start there if you can hack for the listeners

(20:02):
the concept of DSD where biological sex may be inconsistent
with phenotypic sex, and how that is connected to the
element of sareness, particularly for the women's categories. So what
are the elements of DSD that are critical to this

(20:24):
aspect of fairness?

Speaker 3 (20:26):
But I think some are quite a lot of it
really well in your kind of questioning. And I think
the other thing just highlight that people, especially on social media,
that there's a lot of opinions flying out, also seems
to not know very much about is household is governed
and how rules are made. And I mean, I know
that we discussed prior to this conversation. I'm really reluctant

(20:51):
to focus particularly on absolutely individuals. And I think it's
definitely you know, relevant examples and the examples that did
rise at the Olympics and the Paralympics in boxing and
on the track, and there's no one to do that,
but my kind of mind, the athletes have failed by

(21:11):
the small governance of this issue a DSD, as you're
going to lead to their instat the differences in sex development,
and as you kind of also mentioned, it will be
some kind of atypical sex development during pregnancity where there

(21:33):
whereby the protracting or boons and the text chromosomes are
mismatched at birth with the visual genitalia, and what then
happen is an ex y baby or a baby with
with male promo each so may appears to be a
little girl a female due to the lack of any

(21:56):
kind of visible male genitalia, so kapenas and and vice
versa as well. So it means that at first you
can have a baby being ascribed the wrong sex in
terms of their invisible chromatomes, and that starts to manifest
as that's from person will then puberty, and in any

(22:20):
body or any kind of visual with with x y
chroma BOMs with this eminine region on the white amazone
and male, they will then puberty start to initiate a
kind of male sex development and it's more visible. So
then you start to get oreo bear. Younger people from

(22:42):
puberty who were ascribed to female at birth slot to
developed much more masculine physiques, more MASc or mads, and
then that kind of manifests throughout puberty. You've got somebody
who's grown up as a little girl, who might have

(23:03):
even believed themselves for that whole time, then starts to
very masculine characteristics because of the fact that they have
this increased or they have internal tedd's and they have
surround us and of having the effect of developing into
a male. So it causes a very like use of

(23:25):
difficult situation, which is a lot unknown and very very
different from a trance. And that's where we've had this
situation boxing. We've got two athletes competing in female category
and you said, we don't actually have all the facts
because that data hasn't even been publically published. So we're

(23:48):
not even sure what I'm pertinally sure in any case
of the results of those biological tests.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
Right, And that's one of the issues, is that we
don't have all the facts. I think when a governing
body tests, a governing body can test for a myriad
of things, whether it be for scheduled doping, random doping tests,
or any other element of fairness, the governing body just
out of confidentiality won't make that information public for obvious reasons.

(24:21):
The information can't be made public. And then there's the
Court of Arbitration for Sport, which is brought in to
arbitrate and so all of that brings up the complexities.
But I think we learned in the cast of Semenia
case that this can bring up some potential for the

(24:43):
question of fairness, and I think in the cast of
Semenia situation, we found out about the different possibilities that
someone could have of some androgen and sensitivities and five
alpha reduct based deficiency, and in turn we know how
ended up with World athletics. How is that going to develop?

(25:03):
Do you do you have a scientific opinion on which
way that may go? I know that World Athletics has
come down on a certain side. Are we are we
headed to the evolving rules in that case of DSD athletes, Yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Think the other the other thing, like to add what
you've said about all of the kind of difficulties, we
have got a situation at the moment where there is
a like a systematic protest for testing this. So that's
one of the main problems is that where the situation arises,
such as the custos of end case or then are

(25:46):
perform it would be a kind of podium situation. And
the situation that we've just been in boxing in Paris,
for example, it causes like individual problems because it's what
we can steal on the TV, and it's what the
opposing nations might report or it claims against and it's

(26:10):
everybody watching making claims against it, and it gets very personal.
So the problem that we've got is that the testing
is not systematically required. So the fact that these tests
done previously appears to have been a previous or permanent
at a different position before the Olympics took place, with

(26:36):
a claim or a complaint of an opponent opponent team
against a particular athlete and then that athlete being asked
and required to take your test. So you can see
that the problem becomes very pertinent and individual, right, and
that can't it can't be the solution because you know

(26:57):
that it's so many other issues. So I don't know
and what any federation is going to do going forwards,
you know, I can't. I can't predict that. All that
I can do as a scientist is look at the
things that are being published, and I don't need on

(27:17):
a lot of these projects. I'm kind of a collaborator
and a colleague of other people who are kind of
focused or expertise on this particular topic. This is my
main topic of research. But I understand it in that
I can attribute to these kind of arguments and discussions
and come with a perspective that I have as somebody

(27:39):
who competes in sports as well and and part.

Speaker 4 (27:45):
Of the sporting environment.

Speaker 3 (27:47):
But yeah, I think all that we can do is
publish FIA quality or that this is our strategy in
any case, public high quality scientific information that I both
informed the general public and you know, the social media
kind of army, but more importantly policy and the organizations.

(28:10):
So our hope is that you know that paper that
we've published that might come to and talking a bit
more detailed. But they've published in Scandinavian Journal of Medical
Sciences Sport early end this year with Tory Lumberg as
the lead author, and I was very much involved in
our paper as well. But that's the kind of rittle

(28:31):
or a critique of the International Olympic Committee's framework. And
I think that that's a really important paper because it
goes through step by steps systematically and talks about all
the flaws in the framework that they've published. They're trying
to you to manage this difficult situation. It's so far

(28:57):
away from what we should be doing that I think
the scientists, you know, we just have to come and
off the sciencing something different. I'm like, then we can
always get into that in a bit more about. But
I can't speak for what any particular sideration he's going
to do going forward. But I just hook that they
read the they look at the actual science, because at

(29:18):
the moment, it's just it is very politically driven and
emotionally driven, and that's very pragmatic.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
Yeah, let's get into that because we're the IOCA announced
their framework, and I believe it was twenty twenty one,
and I remember back then, I actually initially had a
conversation with a scientist Joanna Harper, you're probably familiar. Well, yeah,
I had a conversation with her in twenty twenty one

(29:46):
about those guidelines. Maybe we can dive into that. What
is your impression of the guidelines. I think you spoke
a little bit about I think with many people, and
I think even Johanna Harper agreed that the the guidelines
sort of fell short. Do you'd think that this was
robust enough coming from the IOC, from someone who's actually

(30:10):
been advised an advisor to the IOC.

Speaker 4 (30:13):
So let me tell you that in June of twenty nineteen,
the IOC brought in a group of scientific advisors and
they had done this on an irregular basis since approximately
nineteen ninety. I was asked to join this group into

(30:34):
twenty fifteen and they brought a group of us in
and their basic message that day was that they were
going to prioritize human rights over science, and that led
to the process of this set of guidelines coming out.

(30:56):
And so it's very clear that they have made inclusion
of priority. They have made a very a very concerted
effort to champion to marginalized groups, transgender people and intersects people.

(31:17):
And certainly, I think it's an important step that an
organization as powerful and you know, as as public as
the IOC has has made this commitment to inclusion, and
I certainly think that that's a positive thing. However, I

(31:42):
do take issue with with some of the details of
the guidelines, and you mentioned two of them in particular,
and if you'd like, we can talk about more details
about the section five and section six.

Speaker 2 (32:05):
Everyone was sort of waiting for some robust, almost like
a scientific paper that gave robust guidance, and it didn't
really deliver that. So, you know, perhaps you can unpack
that for our listeners. Why is this an important issue

(32:25):
that needs real robust scientific guidance as it relates to,
you know, protecting the women's category. Can you and can
you just offer some of the information that you and
other scientists have put in your your paper to try
to solve nor help with the solution.

Speaker 3 (32:43):
Yeah, true, said sure if you want. Twenty This and
Frome work were Letty frame work on set inclusion and
no discrimination basis of gender identity and set very not
actually a scientific pern that's on the big website. Was

(33:06):
that one that you discovered a Dreana? And then last
year or yeah, in twenty twenty three, an actual scientific
paper was published in a British Journal of Sports Medicine,
which is a classic journal in our field, and that
was entitled Position Statement. So that's kind of a group
of experts get together they formulate this position statement, so

(33:26):
it's kind of an opinion piece supposedly completely based on
science and evidence as well. And that was the position
statement on this IOC framework on fairness, conclusion, non discrimination
on the basis of gender identity and text variations. So
that's the paper that we saw as a group, or

(33:47):
you know, all of us saw kind of individually read
it and didn't think it was anywhere close enough to
being up to scratch or up to standard to actually
inform policy and help other federations. That's that's one of
the main issues is that the IOC kind of they
don't take any responsibility as an organization for leading on this.

(34:09):
Rather they kind of put out a lot of politicized ideology,
and then the recommendation was that individual sports governing bodies
international governing bodies would take this on themselves to come
up with their own rules and guidelines. And the problem
with that is, you know, a lot of international governing

(34:32):
bodies of various sports don't have very much money or
resources to do these kind of projects very very well.
So it seems very strange that the IOC would all
together the resources or maybe get input from all of
the different federations and come up with something that actually
suits world sport on a global level, rather than just

(34:54):
kind of passing the buck to all of these federations.
And that's why we're in the position where we are
now where all the different international federations, be it athletic, swimming, rowing, whatever, cycling,
are all obliged to come up with their own solutions
to the problem, which to me just seems absurd and
really inefficient, but nevertheless, to sort of stick to the question,

(35:20):
we try to publish, actually, we try to write a
direct rebuttal to that paper, which is kind of like
a rebuttal is something where you know, a group of
scientists get together and they don't agree with something that's
been published, and they then are allowed to kind of
write a scientific paper that is a statement bracing down
everything that you would feel is not correct. And we first,

(35:43):
first we wrote that paper and we submitted it. It
has to go to the same journal where the original
article is published in that case, and they rejected it,
who were not prepared to enter into this discussion clearly,
and it is a difficult discussion and it is sensitive.
But the the peer reviews that we received on that
paper were shocking, shockingly bad in that none of it

(36:07):
was built based on any kind of science at all.
So we reformulated the paper and wrote it as a
standalone paper, and that's the one that we're talking about.
To we publish it. It's called the IOC Framework on Fairness,
Inclusion and non Discrimination on the basis of Gender identitys
Explorations does not protect fairness for female athletes, So that's
kind of the title of the paper, it's the initial paper,

(36:28):
and then trying to state that it does not protect
fairness for female athletes. And when we say female athletes,
we're talking about you know, biologically born females. It's as
simple as that. That's what the definition is. And what
we do in that paper is we go step by
step through each of the main claims in that position statement,

(36:48):
and we provide a ton of evidence on each of
the claims. And we're not doing this to make a point.
Not everything in that paper to disagree with. There's a
lot of things in that paper, such as inclusion such
of the importance of participation in sport at grassroots all
the way up to the elite level. That's important for

(37:09):
any individual, however they choose to identify. So there are
a lot of things that, you know, in principle, we
agree with the need for the IOC to do this work.
We just don't agree with how they've actually gone about
it and what their paper says. So just very briefly,
I mean, I'm kind of skimming through the paper now,
but there's sub sections. So the first one, males and

(37:31):
females are physically different, and males have a category level
athletic advantage. That's the point that we try to make
in that section, and I'm not going to I'm not
going to go through every section, but hopefully we can
link to it in the show notes or whatever. But
point number four, testosterone suppression post puberty does not negate
the male performance advantage. The point of that section is

(37:52):
to highlight all of the evidence that shows that transitioning
will not take away the advantage that are once born
kind of male person had, so anybody who and actually
it's not only post puberty that you start to get
these advantages as males, like even younger boys start to
show advantages. But the point is is that just by

(38:14):
taking medication to suppress tesosterone, if you're transitioning and become
a trans woman, that isn't gonna then bring you down
to a kind of female athlete level. And obviously these
studies are very difficult to do, and we've really got
a lot of a study kind of evident, but we've
i mean, all of these sections are steeped in kind

(38:37):
of scientific biological data. Section number five just briefly, meaningful
competition is not the same as fair and competition. That
one's a bit tricky because there's some strange kind of
wording used in the original IOC framework position statement. But basically,
just because let's say that a trans woman is competing

(38:58):
against female athletes in an event, just because they all
run around about the same speed or around about the
same time, doesn't mean that that competition is fair. That's
just completely flawed. As an argument, Section number six the
frameworks recommendations for implementation unrealistic and unwork or in practice.

(39:19):
They talk about, you know, taking things on a case
by case basis, and they use an Australian federation as
an example, and it's just not right to single out
individual athletes in that way either. So there does need
to be a kind of systematic approach to this rather
than just picking out cases as they arise, which we've
seen is not a good way to deal with human

(39:42):
beings actually. And then yeah, point I'm saying case by
case consideration is flawed in principle, unlikely to be practical robust.
And then the last two I mean, just to kind
of wrap this up, but I just think it was
worth kind of highlighting how we go through this paper.
And obviously people with more interest can go and read it.
But the last two are around like female athletes the

(40:03):
first one. Female athletes at all levels of sport deserve
access to fair competition because there's kind of arguments that
this only needs to be brought in at the very
top elite level once you become an olympium, for example.
But if you've got these issues going from kind of
grassroots competitive spot, you're already you're already putting other young

(40:27):
girls or female athletes kind of at a disadvantage potentially,
And that also, according to US isn't isn't fair. And
then that final section, they're female athletes are primary stakeholders
and must be consulted. A lot of these policies are made,
papers are written without even asking female athletes what they
think or what they want or what they think is right,

(40:50):
and like it says they're the primary stakeholders. So I mean,
hopefully that's just a bit of an overview of what
that paper looks like, and hopefully you know just by
scanning through a reference list of which if I have
it now, there's eighty five kind of references in that paper.
Like it's very strongly i would say, scientifically underpinned, which

(41:11):
I think is the main problem of that. I see position.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Statement yeah, okay, Yeah, and I think pretty much summarized
the difficulty to suggest that lowering your testosterone can effectively
negate the performance differences. What would you say?

Speaker 3 (41:33):
I was just going to sort of interject there that
quite very recently, I think it was after we published
this paper. I'm not too sure if it was after.
It's been very recent that a paper has come out
from that. There's a group over here in the UK
who have published a paper where they've got some trans
athletes and some female athletes. I don't know whether you've

(41:56):
seen this paper. It's Hamilton at Our and they've kind
of put them through various performance tests and yeah, basically
concluded that trans women who have gone through kind of
test or suppressure with post puberty because in their study
and not outperforming the female coport, then there's obviously no advantage.

(42:23):
And I just think it's really important, you know, a
layperson picking up that paper and reading it, Like how
they paper got through review I don't know, but I
think it's also in BGSM, which is probably how But
you know, a lay person picking up that paper and
reading it could easily be hoodwinked or convinced into that
being proper science, but it's actually comparing like apples with

(42:45):
pet You can't just take a group of X and
compare them with a group of Y and assume that
they're matched. Like a part of doing comparison studies are
that you know your two groups that you're compare and matched.
And that's basically impossible to do with a group of
trans women and a group of like biological females. So

(43:07):
I just kind of wanted to make that point because
the studies that kind of are being done and not
always high quality, and we can't always rely on the
methods and therefore the results and the conclusions of them.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
Yeah, understood. And so one or one of the common
rebuttals is this what I start to call the evoking
of the Phelps principle and the Felped principle sort of
sounds like this, all athletes have advantages, performance advantages. Why
doesn't sport care about unfair advantages when it's Usain Bolt

(43:42):
or Michael Phelps? So how would you answer that question
as a sports scientist about all athletes have some sort
of advantages?

Speaker 3 (43:50):
Well, I think I think that's easy to be honest,
but obviously not everyone kind of sees it, I mean
competitive sport, and you know you're riskally know I already
assume kind of the answer to this, but want to
kind of make it clear for everyone listening who just
won't necessarily have thought through these things. And that's fine,

(44:10):
but competitive sport by definition aims to seek out the
most talented and the most talented are you know, a
combination of those physical attributes like you've just said with
you know, phelps swing along to also and huge hands
and the rest of it. Large feet. So there's physical
kind of characteristics that you might be lucky enough to have,

(44:32):
but it's not every individual who's got the best physique
or the best physiological characteristics that's going to win that
many gold medals. You also need to have the mental capacity.
You need to have tactics, you need to have technical abilities,
you need to be coachable, you need to be dedicated

(44:52):
to committed, you need to have support. You know, there's
so many there's so many things that we know successful
athletes are quiet to have. But that's the whole point
of you know, that's what we love about sport. That's
what we love about competitive sport. Elites bought the Olympics,
the world championships. We want to see that Usain Bolt
or that Michael Phelps or that Katie Lulecki, And that's

(45:15):
what it's all about. But what we always like make
is a robustal is the you know, we call this
a straw man argument. So you can't just take one
example and say, oh, just because but that person's like
got these special talents, So why aren't we Why aren't
we handicapping them? Why aren't we giving everybody else a

(45:36):
head start against Michael Phelps? No, because within his category,
and he's in a category of biological advantage. And that's
the whole point of having male and female categories, because
we know that men, if you take that Bell curve
of all men on the planet age let's say eighteen

(45:58):
to forty, they're going to perform better than all women
on the planet. And that Bell curve is going to
be a long way to the right. And that's the
whole point of it. And that's exactly the same as
you know, we often use the analogy of having age groups.
You know, a twenty five year old man is not
going to race one hundred meters against an eight or
eight year old boy. We have to have age categories

(46:21):
because there's a systematic advantage with age that you know
reaches a point where we peak and then we get
worse as we get older. So when you introduce me
at the beginning being somewhat successful, like that's happened as
I've got older, I haven't got worse. Other people have
got worse more quickly. I've continued to get better. But
like I'm a master's athlete, and I'm a good master's athlete,

(46:44):
but I couldn't beat the best senior elite female to
athletes in the world. I don't think I could. But
the point is is that you know, as you get older,
you go into age groups, you have master categories, you
can carry on competing in that specified and protected categories.
So being a woman and being a female athlete is
a protected category. So that's why you know, there's no

(47:07):
point to single out a Usain Bowl or a Michael
Phelps or anybody else that stand out, because that's what
sport is trying to identify. And the same for we talk.
We often use analogy as one of weight categories in
combat sports for example or rubbing.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
Yeah, so and when I hear that argument above Phelps,
it's sort of greats like singing nails down in blackboard.
Because across all of sport we have sex or medically
defined or biologically defined sex impairments, paara athletes, impaired athletes,
weight categories, lightweight, middleweight, eavyweight, and then like you mentioned age,

(47:50):
and that's really it. That is how we define fairness
across all of sport. With human bodies, every advantage outside
of those are fair game. And that makes sense because
in sport you have to have the minimum number of categories.
If you had a category for every attribute, right, people

(48:11):
with big feet, people with long arms, height, you know,
people who live altitude.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
I have no problem to say that my breast size
is like thirty four f. I mean that's hugely disadvantageous,
like in a sport where I have to run at
the end, you know what I mean. So you would
like you come up with all of these wild categories
to make yourself a winner.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
Yeah. We we create categories when we only when we
need to and we want we want to find Michael Phelps,
Katie Ladecci, Shaquille O'Neil spudweb on this.

Speaker 3 (48:51):
I just I just was going to mention because it's very,
very recent I saw this yesterday. Did you see this?
I mean said that you're in Boston, right, you see
the Boston Marathon.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
Correct, yes, Yeah, And that's interesting because the people around
here have been talking about that because the men's qualifying
times are thirty minutes faster than the women's qualifying time,
and they added the non binary category, which were effectively

(49:26):
just the women's qualifying times. That's interesting because what that
does it gives the non Well, if someone is a
natal male and identifies as non binary, they can now
go down in qualifying time.

Speaker 3 (49:44):
It's another definition of complete inequality. I mean, it's it's
mind blowing, well eaton it is, and how how ignorant it.
I don't know anything. I'm not involved in this. I
don't know anything about it. But I'm somebody that understands

(50:06):
a lot about sport, and a lot about male and
female performance, and a lot about this particular issue and
all the complexities of it as well. So I mean,
I'm not privy to what discussions have been had around
this behind the scenes and in the boardrooms, but you know,
the optics of this are horrific and I can't Yeah,
it's just unfathomable. So no, I just thought it was

(50:27):
it was worth bringing up because you know, this is
this is a this is a day to day kind
of occurrence now that's happening all around us, and I
think it's important to continue to continue to continue to
highlight the fact that this is absurd and not let
this become normal, because that's not normal. It's exactly like
you say, like the fact that the non binary times

(50:50):
are the same as the women's times is completely arbitrary
in the first place, right, and then the only the
only people that that gives them moantage to our trans
women and exactly like you said, any woman transitioning, So
a trans man, a female transitioning doesn't have a different time,
So it's very bizarre. It doesn't make any it doesn't

(51:12):
make any factual sense, yahtically.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
And there was a lot of science that went into
the Yeah, because when you look at Olympic Olympic marathon
qualifying times, in women's marathon qualifying time, that's a delta
of twenty minutes, right, and then I think the original
professor that helped them come up with that came up
with the thirty minute delta for non professionals. So the

(51:40):
science that goes into that delta is solid, so people
must look at that and understand the reality of that difference. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:50):
I wonder where that professor was then, because yeah, like
you say, like if the elite time is twenty, I mean,
we know that the depth of the field is smaller
in women's and as the level goes down, the difference
gets larger. I mean, I'm actually quite surprised that it's
half an hour. What's the board on age categories? But yeah, no,
never that's but yeah, it's it's I'm not arguing particularly,

(52:14):
I don't know enough about how those standards have been
developed in the science behind them, but certainly that non
binary standard is is just a standout kind of absurdity
is the only word that I can really think of,
to be honest.

Speaker 2 (52:29):
Yeah, but and I want to be sensitive to your time,
So you know, how about we if we can go
into the performance cycles of women and how that impacts
their training cycles and racing cycles if at all, I
know you've done some work on this, and.

Speaker 3 (52:48):
Just just just to wrap up that first topic, I'd
be a little bit careful to make sure you know
and I know that these were this was down on
the kind of discussion points before. But I do think
it's important that you know, I think that and the
group of us who wrote these papers as well, we
think that inclusion in sport is very very important, and

(53:12):
we think that, you know, everybody should have the opportunity
to be an athlete at any level. So I just
want to kind of clarify that nothing that we've written,
and nothing that we think, and nothing that we say
is in any way trying to be excluding of any
type of individual, regardless of who they are, what disability

(53:32):
they might have, how they might choose to identify in
terms of their gender. But like you've kind of alluded
to with the language that you've been using, I mean,
there's a difference between sex and gender, and I think
like there's I don't I don't know the percentage of
people that understand that difference, but I think it's very small,
and it's concerning that there is a difference between sex

(53:54):
and gender and you can't choose to socially identify some
other way whatever might be involved in that in terms
of how you feel and even how that might be
affecting your mental health. These are all really valid scenarios
for any given individual, and obviously that that's the case

(54:15):
even you know, through development as a young child and
that all that, all those kind of issues that might
be occurring, but to me, they don't trump the structure
that we already have in sport. And we have to
find another solution. And we do talk about those in
the papers as well, but there has to be another
solution rather than just ignoring the new problems that we're

(54:41):
creating with these kind of semi almost what I would
call non solutions that's going on at the moment. So
that was the only thing just to kind of wrap
up on that topic. Really, I think that was quite
keen to.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
Say, right, agreed. I mean, sports sort of rests on
a pillar of fairness, whether it's you know, doping, antidoping.
We're having a for the last couple of years, we've
had an argument about shoes, so called super shoes. A

(55:12):
lot of people think that they have an effect, and
you know, and this is another just another part of
the fairness question in sport. It's a pillar of fairness
and if that pillar is compromised, then all of sport
is compromised. Right, so understood, And I will be looking

(55:36):
at you and other scientists work and continue to keep
my finger on the pulse of what's happening here and
report out. Thank you for that. So let's let's finish
up if we could, with the performance of female athletes
in the training cycle. What can you tell us about how,

(56:00):
whether you're you're an athlete or you're a coach, how
should we approach the training cycle? And you know, if
we're looking at the twenty eight day cycle, how should
we approach the different phases? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (56:16):
Good, And this is something I guess I spend a
bit more of my kind of research time and my
consultancy time working on as well. I think the first
and probably most important thing that I can say, if
if the listeners take anything away, it's that variation is
huge here. Variation from one woman to the next in
terms of how her cycle, how long her cycle is,

(56:39):
whether she even has a cycle, or whether she's using
some kind of momental contraception or the contraception, how that
mental cycle is going to manifest, how much blood she loses.
It's so variable from one person to the next is
one thing. And then also there's actually, you know, a
reasonable amount of variation within any given individual. Also any

(57:00):
one person from month to month, from year to year
over their lifespan, there's obviously a lot of change, but
even through like an athletic career, So I think like
we always come from this approach of tracking is key.
First of all, tracking is just like basically a kind
of systematic way to collect data and information. So it's

(57:24):
exactly the same as if you're going to have some
kind of a training diary, Like if you're a coach,
the first thing that you want to know, I want
to know is like, you know, what are your athletes
do it? Firstly, you need to plan their training, what
do they need to do, and then you need to
kind of assess what are they actually doing? Are the
two things matching up? In a lot of sports, you know,

(57:45):
a coach might be on site and seeing what they're doing,
and it's very prescribed. Endurance athletes might just get a
program and they go off and they carry it out
and then they brought back and you know they're using
training peaks or some kind of diary system, so there's
a constant, clear communication about what's going on. And historically
that hasn't happened from a kind of menstrual cycle perspective

(58:05):
female athletes because we just haven't had the knowledge, it's
been very taboo. Male coaches typically find it difficult and embarrassing.
Women also might find it difficult embarrassing to talk to
male coachings even female coaches about this. So there's all
these different barriers. We've done some work and identifying what
those barriers are, and they're first team knowledge. Knowledge is poor,

(58:26):
and knowledge is poor because there's not much scientific evidence
or good quality scientific evidence, especially in kind of applied
sports scenarios. And then the interpersonal relationships are tricky, is
a hard thing to talk about. And then another thing
is those structural forums or platforms don't really exist. So
now you know, there's plenty of mental cycle tracking apps.

(58:50):
The consultancy company that I work with, Oracle, we have
our own one which is kind of widely used across
the world Fit a Woman, which is great. There's other
ones as well, and that'll allow you and we've actually
developed a product, I think it's the only one that
exists called Fitter Coach, where any fitter woman kind of
tracking data, a coach can actually collect all of that

(59:11):
information to their group of athletes and then they can
see all of the kind of cycle characteristics, the symptoms
when their athletes are due to their period, and we've
used that with like national soccer teams, for example, ahead
of the Euros or the World Cup, to try to
help the athletes manage what's going to be coming up
because we can kind of we've got algorithms there that

(59:33):
run predictions and trends, so we can kind of say, okay,
when you've got this match, this is likely to happen.
So basically, in terms of the scientific evidence, there isn't
any clear evidence that says that performance is better or
more impaired at any particular phase of the cycle, any
particular point in the cycle. That just doesn't exist on

(59:54):
a large group level. It will exist on a kind
of an individual level, but whether it's the same from
month to month all the time, not necessarily. There's some
kind of evidence, but you know, a lot of the
studies are poorly controlled, but there's some evidence to suggest
that maybe your bigger strength and power training, and this

(01:00:16):
is that typical idea or notion that we have might
be better done during the follicular phase when you've got
that high estrogen and mo progesterone in that first phase
between you know, the start of the mental cycle and
then that ovulations the first half of the cycle, but
guessing where that phase is quite difficult, Like everybody will

(01:00:38):
have quite a different cycle duration. So you mentioned twenty
eight days. The official definition of a eu menary woman
is twenty anywhere twenty one to thirty five days. Lots
and lots of athletes, especially high training load athletes at
a high level and not umnoyeic, they miss their mental cycles.
They might be oligomeneric or just blame amen ay. And

(01:01:01):
then obviously lots of athletes are using hormonal contraception and
that's often as well, I would say poorly and a
bit too quickly prescribed from a young age to manage
menstrual cycle symptoms, and that has kind of knock on
effects that we might come on too. But I just
want to make it clear that there's no there's no
blank it kind of this is the best way to train,

(01:01:23):
and this is when you're going to perform best. Any
athlete is going to be able to, you know, win
their gold medal if that's the level that they're at
at any time across their cycle. So it's more about
managing symptoms, managing individual expectations, managing the psychology and the mindset,
managing the communication and the discussions, and just improving knowledge

(01:01:47):
and thinking about, yeah, the different things that you can
do when you might need to take iron supplementation, for example,
what kind of period products are going to be useful
or required. You know, there's lots of things to have
in mind that are more practical. So I say, that's
a bit of a kind of summary.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
During that week, during the week of menstruation. And if
let's say you were coaching an athlete, would you suggest
that they plan their race scheduling around it or is
it still highly individual individualized?

Speaker 3 (01:02:25):
I think it's a bit individual like some athletes obviously, Sorry,
some events you're completely out of control of, like the
Olympic Games. You can't choose when that event is going
to sit, or a bit a championships event or something.
If you can choose your schedule, then sure, but I
think that that should be done. You know, you need
to monitor your cycles for some time, a few months

(01:02:46):
at least. That's why there monitoring and building up that
database is so important. So you know, start building up
a database so that you can get some predictions of
what's happening in the future. But also you've then got
a database of how you feel and when you are
affected and how heavy you're bleeding. Is like I personally
have one day and it's not even necessarily a it's

(01:03:08):
not twenty for our period. It's typically sort of twelve hours.
So I can be lucky in that, well lucky in
a way. You know, if that happens at the night
time kind of doesn't affect what you're doing in the daytime,
but then it does affect your sleep. But if it
kind of occurs in the daytime, and that for me
varies when I start to get my period and when
the heaviest kind of twelve our block will be. Whereas

(01:03:30):
I've got other girlfriends that I'll talk to and they
come on exactly the same time of day every single cycle.
So even those kind of things are really variable. But
the point is is, you know, I'm a trathlete or
that's my sport, So swimming on that day of like
my heaviest period, which has got worse over time, it's
kind of a bit awkward, or it's a bit worrying,

(01:03:52):
or it's like you don't want to be in the pool.
If there's that kind of feeling that you're going to
leak blood, I mean, and all these things people aren't
really talking about or you know, even having these conversations
like all you know, saying some kind of words that
take people or a back. So it might be that
like a sea swim for me, I'd of right on
the sea, like maybe that's better option, or I just

(01:04:13):
schedule it so that I'm not swimming in the pool
on that heaviest day where I can have those kind
of worries. And it's quite easy to switch around other
kind of power athletes. You do have kind of physical
changes obviously, and your kind of joint laxity and then
your muscle function. A friend of mine is a strength
conglistening coach for one of her very good one hundred

(01:04:34):
meter runners, and I think she's actually openly talked publicly
as well about kind of sometimes needing to monitor her modify, sorry,
her heavy strength training sessions if she's got quite a
sore back in those pre menstrual days, she doesn't want
to do some of her Olympic lifting or some of
her real heavy weight sessions strength and power sessions. So

(01:04:57):
that's where you know, every scenario I would say is
somewhat case by case not to the point where if
you're a soccer coach or a team sport coach of
twenty athletes and you've got all this kind of huge
logistical nightmare of trying to manage every single individual. But
we will do things with elite soccer clubs where we'll

(01:05:18):
have kind of pockets of athletes, or we'll try to
individualize it or get them in doing different programs on
different days. It just takes you know, more and more
sports female sports clubs where they have the capacity a
kind of employing kind of a female health expert, even
if it's just kind of a part time role, but

(01:05:39):
to manage these kind of things to really get the
most out of their female athletes around all of these factors. Well,
it's not rocket science and it's not make or break,
but it's it's just like nutrition or it's like your recovery.
It's another thing that you need to be on top of.

Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
These are things that natal women have to deal with
it I don't have to deal with or male athletes
have to deal it, right, and this sort of gets
lost in the conversation. I think it probably should be
talked about more. The physiologist Stacy Simms wrote that book
back in twenty sixteen called Roar and I read that

(01:06:18):
book and I said, wow, you know, her tagline was
women are not small men, and just she started talking
about how with science skewed towards towards towards men and
there's not a lot of science about it for women,
and so, you know, and that's what I really got
on my radar screen that you know, I really should

(01:06:39):
be talking with my female athletes about this, and like
you said, sometimes they don't want to touch it other women,
other women do want to touch it, and just trying
to look at it as another variable that they can
use to try to dial into their performance. Is there
a contraception effect?

Speaker 3 (01:07:01):
Yeah, again at thatify large group effects level. Not really.
I don't know whether you saw or kind of the
listeners would be would have seen in I think it
was one. A couple of systematic reviews and meta analyses
came out with Kirsty and Itsel and Kelly MacNulty on
the first authors, respectively. One was about metro cycle phases

(01:07:26):
of a performance, what we already talked about in the
other one was about hormonal contraceptive use and kind of performance.
And in that systematic review of meta analysis, there weren't
any kind of significant effects of hormonal contraceptive use on performance.
They did find a sort of trivial so that just

(01:07:47):
means that, you know, there might be some sort of
effect whereby hormonal contraceptive use is going to be detrimental
for performance compared to a natural mental cycler. But there
was so much variation across the different studies, So I mean,
I'm sure you'll know, But just for the listeners, a
systetical view at meta analysis just takes kin of all

(01:08:08):
the papers that are available, all the research that's available,
and pulls it and tries to come out with a
kind of overall consensus. But what they do talk about
in both of those papers actually is how quite poor
a lot of the studies have been historically because we
haven't had the funding to do these studies really well.

(01:08:28):
They're actually very time consuming because you really ought to
do them over a series of menstrual cycles or hormonal
contraceptive use cycles. There's so many different types of pill.
If you use an oral contraceptive pill with different chemical
makeups and different hormonal kind of exogenous hormonal makeups, so
all those things have not really been standardized. You need

(01:08:49):
huge amounts of women to find a group of a
particular hormonal contraception that you can then kind of track
over time, and you need really good adherence to that
sort of study as well, So they're very very difficult
to do well, i'll in practice. So yeah, there's lots
of variation. There might be some trivial effect. But then
the other thing that we do know about all concept

(01:09:10):
or commonial conception, is that it might need to kind
of increased systemic or chronic inflammation. And there are like
physiological studies showing that, and that doesn't have to be
an athlete cohorts of kind of elevated CRP and other
measures of information. And we know that that kind of

(01:09:31):
chronic information is going to cause cellular damage, it decreases
kind of immune function or suppresses immune function, It inhibits
some training adaptations, it inhibits recovery, and all those kind
of things. So at a physiological level, it could well
be that that kind of chronic use is not helping, right,
But what we remember as well, I mean, it's a medication,

(01:09:54):
so should we anyway?

Speaker 2 (01:09:55):
Is it?

Speaker 3 (01:09:56):
You know, it's been so normalized to take a fifteen
sixteen year old who go into her GP, her medical
practitioner and saying, Oh, I'm struggling really badly with menstrual crowns,
and I feel like I've got a lot of like symptoms,
pre mental symptoms, and without very much alternative whatsoever. You know,
these young girls are being put on a contraceptive pill

(01:10:19):
from a very young age. They then as they develop
as athletes, they've got no idea if they would have
had regular menstrual cycles. They don't know anything about their
natural estrogen. Their bone health can be affected, their fertility
could be at risk. So I mean, for me, yeah,
I really struggle with with that situation. And we see

(01:10:39):
that a lot, particularly in sport, to manage those symptoms
and also to manipulate periods like you were saying, or
manipulate that bleeding so that it doesn't occur when we
might have an important competition. So I just think that
we really need to think twice, three times, four times,
five times before just blindly doing these kind of things.

Speaker 2 (01:11:00):
Yeah. Yeah, and then it's so much to think about here.
And wow, I mean we really covered some ground and
a couple of these things that we touched on, you
could have it its own our conversations. So but I'm
glad I got some time on your calendar to be

(01:11:22):
able to do this. I really appreciate it. How can
people follow you online?

Speaker 3 (01:11:27):
Well, I've just I've just kind of signed I think
I've had a LinkedIn profile for quite a while, but
I don't use it. I'm a LinkedIn learner, so I've
got quite a distinctive name, So Kerry mcgauley. I'm on Twitter,
I'm on Instagram, which is probably a bit more personal,
and now I'm learning learning LinkedIn. But otherwise I've got
my Midtween University email address, so maybe you know, you

(01:11:51):
can share that in your notes if anyone's got anything
pertinent to reach out about. And then yeah, you kind
of see I guess our publications as well on something
like a platform right research Gate or PubMed.

Speaker 2 (01:12:03):
Yeah, and then if you go follow you on Instagram,
we can see all of your triathlon accolades. Well, what
are you guys coming up next? Anything big?

Speaker 3 (01:12:12):
When I'm going to do that? I beat the T
one hundred race, which is a week from this weekend,
So they've got the pro race on the Saturday and
then age group race on a Sunday. But I've currently
got a calf injury. I've never been injured before, so
it's it's killing me. I can't actually run at the moment,
so we'll see. And then the Taupo seventy point three
Worlds are at the end of the year in December,

(01:12:34):
so we'll see if I can kind of get ready
for that.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
Okay, all right, I'll be watching and see what you do. Great. Thanks,
all right, well, thanks again for this. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (01:12:46):
Yeah, thanks for having me on in the chat. I
mean it was I mean just for me, like off like,
it was such a nice chat to have with you.
You're obviously very very well read and well informed and
have a clear passion around sport. And yes, it was
a reading us conversation for me to as well with you.

Speaker 2 (01:13:06):
My thanks to Professor Carry mcgauley. You can find her
links in the show notes to her social media presence
as well as her bio, as well as her recent
co authored paper. You know. Back in twenty nineteen, I
predicted that this conversation would be one of the biggest

(01:13:27):
issues in all of sport, and here we are in
twenty twenty four and I think that proved to be true.
In twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three World Aquatics
and World Athletics released there revised and refactored requirements they
govern international Swimming and International Track and Field, respectively. The

(01:13:51):
new requirements read that they are protecting the women's category
and making some accomadations for other athletes accordingly with categorization.
We'll have to watch and see where other governing bodies
fall over the next few years as they wrestle with
this question and as it relates to high contact and

(01:14:14):
combat sports. While there's absolutely no question about it, this
is a measure nine times cut once type of decision
when there's safety risks and liability involved. So let's hope
that they are carefully weighing all of their decisions to

(01:14:37):
close out. One of the things that I think about
in the history of humanity or human ancestors, someone at
some point in time, an ancestor of humans drew some line,
perhaps in the dirt, and then drew a another line

(01:15:00):
in the dirt somewhere farther off. That ancestor of humans
looked at their peers and said, I'll race you from
this line to that line. In whatever language or dialect
they were using. I sometimes wish I can get into
a time machine and go back to that point in

(01:15:25):
history whenever it occurred, because that was the birth of
the racer and perhaps the birth of sport and sport
is one of the greatest, most important and unique concepts
ever created by humanity, and so that's why we hear

(01:15:45):
people speaking so passionately on all sides of the issue
on how to include as many people as possible and
how to make sport as fair as possible. We now
have over one hundred years of organized competitive sport and

(01:16:05):
sport science to rely on. I recall being in one
of my coaching training courses. In it was on antidoping.
The instructor was talking about how the doping control officer
procures an a sample in a b sample and I

(01:16:26):
asked a question. I said, how do you determine that
the athlete gives you an actual sample from their own body?
She said, the doping control officer must and I'll never
forget this quote, see the fluid leave the body. What

(01:16:50):
that means is the doping control officer has to literally
watch the urine come out of the body's opening and
watched the fluid go into a receptacle that just gives
you one example of how important fairness is to sport.

(01:17:14):
We've had debates over the years in regards to so
called swimsuits, super swimsuits. I think one was called the
Speedo laser swimsuit that was eventually banned. Over the last
few years, like I said on the podcast, we've had
arguments about so called super shoes with people thought gave

(01:17:37):
an unfair advantage. And you remember the circumstance with the
blade runner aust Pastorius, who ran in the Olympics with
his prosthetic blades. In the governing body initially thought we

(01:17:58):
think those pieces of equipment that you have might give
you an unfair advantage. It was eventually allowed to run.
All of this is happening because when you decide to
particularly become a racer, and you decide you're going to
devote your entire life from starting at one line or

(01:18:20):
wall and going to some other line or wall and
trying to traverse the distance in between in the shortest
time possible, then you're spending your life trying to, as
we saw in the Olympics, separate yourself from a competitor

(01:18:45):
by tens of seconds, even thousands of seconds. We saw
the one hundred meter men's track and field final, the
first and second place finishers were separated by a time
faster than a human can blink. With racers, a first

(01:19:09):
place finisher and an eighth place finisher, whether it be
track and field or swimming, as we've seen, can be
separated by tenths of seconds thousands of seconds, So even
the slightest advantage in so far that it may be unfair,
would have a pretty substantial impact on an outcome. And

(01:19:32):
this is the reason why whenever we have questions of
any sort of element of unfair advantage, whether or not
an athlete quote unquote lost in the past is irrelevant,
because the margin of victory between first place and even
tenth plate is often small, and therefore sport necessarily has

(01:19:56):
to be forward looking. Thank you for listening. Next up,
as always, when I end a season, I will follow
with my best of episode, which allows me to take
a look back at the five most downloaded episodes of

(01:20:22):
the season. I will provide a clip and updated commentary
on those five episodes, and then we'll start editing and
recording for season seven. Thanks again.

Speaker 1 (01:20:41):
Follow Event Horizon Endurance Sport on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The training programs and services to become a member of
our Endurance Institute. All recomplete archive of podcasts long on
to our website, Event Horizon dot tv