South African Olympic champion Caster Semenya has ended her seven-year legal fight against track and field’s sex eligibility rules, closing one of sport’s longest and most divisive sagas.
Semenya’s lawyer, Patrick Bracher, confirmed on Thursday that she would not take her case back to Switzerland’s supreme court, despite winning a major ruling at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in July that had appeared to open a new path forward.
“Caster’s legal challenge reached the highest possible court with a highly successful outcome and will not be taken further in the circumstances,” Bracher said in an email to the Associated Press.
The decision marks a quiet conclusion to a legal journey that began in 2018 and has shaped a decade of global debate over gender, biology, and fairness in sport.
Semenya, now 34, has been unable to compete in her signature 800 meters since 2019, when World Athletics required athletes with certain differences in sex development (DSD) to take medication to suppress naturally high testosterone levels. She refused to do so, arguing that the rules were discriminatory and violated her right to compete as she was born.
“I am a woman, and I am a world-class athlete,” she told reporters in 2020. “I don’t need permission to be myself.”
Her case went before three courts, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), the Swiss Federal Tribunal, and finally the European Court of Human Rights.
She lost her initial appeals, but the ECHR later ruled that she hadn’t received a fair hearing, finding that the Swiss courts had failed to properly weigh her claims of discrimination. That ruling was hailed as a breakthrough for athletes’ rights, though it did not overturn the regulations themselves.
For Semenya, the ruling came too late to change the trajectory of her career. Once the most dominant middle-distance runner in the world, she has since shifted her focus to coaching and advocacy.
“The fight has taken everything from me,” she said last year in an interview with The Guardian. “But I hope it helps the next generation of women.”
The regulations she fought against have only tightened. Earlier this year, World Athletics introduced a new framework that no longer relies on testosterone levels but instead requires female athletes to undergo genetic testing for the presence of a Y chromosome. Any athlete who fails the test is banned from competing in the women’s category. The updated policy took effect in September 2025.
World Athletics maintains that the rules are necessary to preserve fairness, arguing that DSD athletes with XY chromosomes and male-range testosterone enjoy a significant performance advantage. That claim has been heavily contested by scientists and human rights groups, who say the governing body’s evidence is limited and its policies amount to policing women’s bodies.
Human Rights Watch called the latest round of regulations “deeply invasive and scientifically shaky,” warning that they risk targeting women from the Global South. A 2022 United Nations report reached a similar conclusion, stating that sex testing and eligibility rules have disproportionately affected Black women athletes.
Since Semenya’s rise to global attention, she won her first world title at 18 and Olympic golds in 2012 and 2016, other sports have followed track and field’s lead. World Aquatics, cycling, and boxing have all implemented stricter eligibility frameworks in recent years.
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, controversy erupted when Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting were accused of failing past sex verification tests, both have appealed.
For more than a decade, Semenya has been at the heart of a debate that is as personal as it is political, a test of how sport defines gender and fairness in an age of growing scientific scrutiny. To some, she was a symbol of competitive imbalance, to others, a victim of a system unwilling to accept biological diversity.
Her case may have ended, but its ripples will continue to shape the future of women’s sport.
“I’ve said everything I needed to say,” she told BBC Sport earlier this year. “History will judge.”
