After Banda became joint second-highest scorer at the Tokyo Olympics with six goals, Zambia said they were aware that her testosterone levels exceeded CAF’s maximum permitted levels and that a course of hormone suppression had been offered to the striker. But Banda, together with two other players – Kundananji and Racheal Nachula, also in the starting XI for the match against Australia – is said by the Football Association of Zambia to have refused to take suppressants, for fear of potential side-effects.
But while these players’ testosterone was sufficiently high to rule them out of AFCON, the rules laid down by Fifa and the International Olympic Committee are far more lenient, making sex testing a matter for national federations. As such, Zambia were free to call up Banda, Kundananji and Nachula for last year’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand and this summer’s Paris Games.
‘We are entitled to ask questions’
Lucy Zelic, an Australian presenter commentating on the Matildas’ Olympic campaign, said: “Are we ready to discuss the elephant in the room? We are entitled to ask questions. That the International Olympic Committee do not have ‘as strict’ rules when it comes to gender testing is a slight on the credibility of the organisation.”
Football Australia has so far declined to comment.
Fifa is understood to have its policy on players with elevated testosterone under review, insisting that it is monitoring the latest legal and medical updates. But it also stresses that it takes its ultimate guidance from the IOC.
The IOC is already under intense pressure to explain how it has allowed two boxers, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, to compete against women in Paris despite failing biochemical sex tests last year. “I would just say that everyone competing in the women’s category is complying with the competition eligibility rules,” Mark Adams, the IOC’s spokesman, said on Tuesday. “They are women in their passports. It is stated that that is the case.”
On the wider and increasingly urgent question of what action the global governing body intended to take, Adams deflected to the federations. “It’s incredibly complex,” he argued. “It actually boils down not just to sport by sport, but to discipline by discipline. So people may have an advantage in one discipline and not another if they have been through male puberty or not. That is a conversation that we have to leave to each federation.”
