Unfair Play

Introduction

There's a moment before an Olympic final when time stands still and the champion mindset fills the void - or not. Mental toughness plays a big part. Races can be won and lost in that gap between the whistle that calls an athlete to their blocks and the firing of the starting gun.

Friends, family, coaches, even a nation, are confident on your behalf, while you, the athlete, have self-belief built on long, hard years of work and the knowledge that you left no legal stone unturned in your preparation. At that moment your enemies are not your opponents but fear of failure, fear of blame, fear of letting down the people who've made big sacrifices for you along the way.

Knowing that the next few minutes of a race are likely to define you for the rest of your life is scary!

In fact, when I get nervous today I always look back to that moment and think, 'If I could manage that I can pretty much manage anything.' Sport has been a blessing in my life - it's made me strong, even if the strain has worn out a few bits of my body.

From a young age, my dad and coach Terry taught me to be tough, to be ready for any challenge. There were years of intense, all-consuming work before my first Olympics at 13, then four more years under huge scrutiny and expectation until I lined up in Moscow aged 17 at the Games again. This time, it meant the biggest moment of an Olympian's life: the battle for an Olympic title.

I was in the form of my life for the 400 metres medley final in the swimming pool, but I also knew that it wouldn't be enough to win. I might even miss out on a medal altogether because the lanes next to me included three East German women on male steroids and programmed to be decades ahead of their rivals.

'Take your mark.' Bang! For the next 4 minutes, 46 seconds, all thought and energy is ploughed into being the very best you can be when it most counts. The clock stops. It's silver ahead of two East Germans and I've set a British record that won't be broken for more than two decades. The 1980 Games end with me as the only female individual medallist on the whole GB Olympic Team. That's how hard it is to beat an unfair advantage.

Enhanced by testosterone, the winner of my race sets a standard good enough to make most Olympic podiums and every Olympic final for the next 41 years.

We all knew why. I'd trained every day for years knowing I was facing that unfair advantage, knowing that I was being cheated out of medals at every passing international competition. It was the same for my teammates and women from countries all over the world. And not a single person in authority raised a red flag or fought at the top tables of Olympic power for us, for a level playing field, for the pledges set out in the Olympic Charter.1

Had it not been for the German Democratic Republic (GDR) fraud, I would have had Olympic and European titles as well as World Championship medals to go with my Commonwealth golds. My British teammate Ann Osgerby would also have been an Olympic gold medallist. She would have led a totally different life because of the opportunities that would have come her way. And Ann was far from being the only one. So many women lost their rightful rewards because of the GDR and because the International Olympic Committee (IOC) failed to stop the cheating and turned a blind eye to the truth.

We'll show you just how bad it was later in the book.

Everyone in sport knew it. Most had to look no further than the shape and musculature of the East German girls. It turned out that not a single GDR medal-winning performance among women was achieved without drugs. We didn't know precisely what those drugs were at the time, nor how they were getting away with it. When the cast-iron proof of mass systematic cheating came flooding in with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Olympic sports authorities let it go.

To this day, I feel a deep sense of despair that we don't learn from history. Having failed female athletes for half a century by refusing to take action when a whole nation doped its females with a decisive dose of male advantage, Olympic authorities have watched the transgender crisis unfold and responded in exactly the same way. They've let it go.

Yet again, it's female athletes who will pay the price. They are the only ones who will lose rewards, recognition, status, opportunities and lifelong benefits.

This time it's not artificial testosterone in doses just big enough to guarantee gold. It's the full force of male biological development that's been given a ticket to female competition, making contenders out of mediocre males self-identifying their way out of biological reality to a new status in sport.

Having lived a lifetime of injustice, I was determined not to let it happen again. After five years of campaigning for the women's category to be ring-fenced for females, I watched unfair play reach my own sport of swimming in predictable fashion.

I was transported back four decades by the cries for help from the women who faced Lia Thomas, a 6' 4" biological male, at the American National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championships in 2022. Not only did they have to compete against an opponent fresh out of three seasons of racing as a man at the University of Pennsylvania, but they were also threatened with exclusion and expulsion if they complained that they'd been forced to change alongside an athlete with male genitalia intact and exposed.

It was a case of sports authorities being so influenced by the politics of societal trends that they failed female athletes in monstrous style.

We've been forced to confront increased physical danger in contact sports and rising mental-health challenges because inclusion has meant invasion, injustice and ultimately exclusion from our own category. There's a denial of peer-reviewed science and wilful blindness to the loss of opportunities for women to make teams, finals and podiums or to write their achievements in CVs and on job applications. The consequences of being cheated out of such things span whole lifetimes, as we know from the fallout from the GDR years.

The threat to female sport, to women's rights, including safety on the field of play and privacy in the locker room, reaches every level, grass roots upwards. Even on primary school sports days, mixed-sex races are being encouraged, leaving young girls with nowhere to shine. What message does that send?

Females have been told that we must pretend that male development has nothing to do with meteoric rises up the rankings by biological males who on transition go from average men to champions among women. Yet again, everyone on the side of the pool or track knows the truth. Few of them have been asked by their governing bodies to speak it.

For saying such things, I've been vilified, accused of being transphobic, a bigot, even sexist (not sure how that works) and a right-wing extremist. It's got nothing to do with politics. I have always fought for everyone's right to human equality and safety to be themselves. Radical activists don't want to hear anything that they can't turn into a weapon in their cancel-culture campaigns that result in loss of livelihood and death threats - something that my family and I have faced. We're not alone.

It's a successful tactic. The insults are meant to shut you up and the lies are used to ruin reputations, inflict financial harm and drain people of their will to fight back. It's bullying, plain and simple, and we shouldn't tolerate it as some suggest we should purely on the grounds that trans people are 'an oppressed minority'. Whether they are or not, this member of a much larger, but still oppressed majority feels it's only fair to mention that the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and related UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development note that women's rights, including those on equality and access to food and education, are among the most violated on a consistent basis.2

In his book , Nicholas D. Kristof notes that, in the last 50 years, more girls were killed precisely because they were girls than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century.3

Numerous UN reports, including depressing projections for poverty suggesting a worsening crisis, show how a range of key problems around the world have a disproportionate impact on females, at national and international level.4 Pay gaps across the developed world including in the UK are still a big issue.

I was one of those preparing for a forum in Cardiff in 2022, at which women just wanted to meet and discuss their concerns, when we had to inform police that trans activists were threatening to burn down the venue with all of us in it. We ought to have been shocked, but it's par for the course in the vile debate over trans rights and how they impact others.

Activists turn up to women's forums in balaclavas, hurling obscenities. Some get arrested for their attacks, yet many politicians are loath to openly defend women's rights the way they should, and the way the vast majority of the general public want them to, as polls often show us. Why is society so scared of this extremely vocal minority?

We delve into that question in the pages of this book, which include the science that explains why sport must be safe, then fair, then inclusive, in that order, not inclusive at the expense of all else.

The exclusive nature of sport is the very thing that makes it inclusive to a wide range of people across society. Where the 15-year-old is excluded from the under-tens, the...