But then along came the IPC, who, in deciding there was no problem in World Para Athletics’ policy of allowing somebody who had run until the age of 45 as a man to identify into female sport, put up a barrier she could never hope to surmount.
It is now an active choice that these administrators are making. Petrillo’s need for validation as female matters more, in their eyes, than Folgado’s right to fair sport. It is easy just to shake your head at the perversity. The danger is that this is just what they want. The IPC would prefer to brush the subject aside, focusing only on the successes of the Paris Games: the two million-plus tickets sold, the passionate crowds, the unabashed partisanship of the French. But there is a fundamental injustice being perpetrated at the heart of this purest of events, and it should not be ignored.
JK Rowling is undaunted in calling out the gutlessness of it all. Responding to Telegraph Sport’s coverage of the Petrillo controversy, she again ridiculed the athlete, who had retaliated at being labelled by her as an “out-and-proud cheat” by claiming never to have read the Harry Potter books. “In fairness,” she said, acidly, “if never reading Harry Potter turned a man into a woman this would be a really strong counter-argument.”
‘Nobody reaches 50 and suddenly becomes a Paralympian’
For all the manifest unfairness of the situation, Parsons gave no specific timescale for when it would be redressed. “We should probably have a more unified approach when it comes to transgender participation,” he said. “We don’t have it yet, but I think it’s something we need to work out as quickly as possible. But always guided by science.”
The trouble is that the IPC already have the science in front of them. They just choose not to do anything about it.
Last year, World Athletics, acting directly on the latest scientific advice, resolved that it was unconscionable for anybody who had gone through male puberty to compete against women at elite international level. In March this year, a journal article co-authored by dozens of academics documented the critical performance differences between men and women in the baldest terms. One graphic illustrated how many active runners in the world rankings had gone under 10.9sec for 100m: just 12 women, as against 5,150 men.
Now apply this differential to Petrillo. As a male, the category in which the athlete ran until 2018, Petrillo was little more than an adequate veteran club runner, whose personal best for 400m was over three and a half seconds outside the minimum male qualifying standard for the Paralympics. But having only had to show an ‘F’ in a passport to qualify as female in Paris, Petrillo ended up beating a 20-year-old woman who had spent her life training for this moment. Irene Aguiar, a lawyer who has highlighted the scandal in Spain, was aghast. “The peak of sporting performance in these events is between 20 and 25 years of age,” she said. “Nobody reaches 50 and suddenly becomes a Paralympian.”
Quite so. Those who acquiesced in this must be held to account, and the first is Parsons. All women deserve to have their sporting talents tested on a level playing field, not to have their dreams curtailed by a patently unfair rule, reduced to being unwitting pawns in the affirmation of any male-born opponent’s wishes. It is an outrage – and it cannot go on.
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After seeing the beauty of these Games defaced by the spectacle of Valentina Petrillo, a 51-year-old father-of-two, taking semi-final places in female sprinting from two women barely half the Italian’s age, you might have expected Andrew Parsons, president of the International Paralympic Committee, to commit – at the very least – to a review of the ridiculous policy that let this happen. Instead he seemed, at his closing press conference, almost to celebrate it as a watershed.
“When it comes to transgender athletes, they are breaking barriers everywhere,” Parsons said. “I remember a couple of years ago, saying to our board, ‘Look, it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.’” There could scarcely be a more vivid illustration of the passivity and cowardice defining decision making on this issue at the highest levels of global sport.
The IPC knew about the Petrillo case: after all, at last year’s World Championships, this self-declared “trans dad” had won two bronze medals as a woman in the 200m and 400m for visually impaired runners as a woman. But rather than intervening, they sat back and did nothing, only to acclaim Petrillo’s presence in Paris as a breakthrough.
Parsons began these 11 days by spelling out his ambition for an “inclusion revolution”. Include everybody: that is the mantra. Even if it now means excluding women from their own category. This is not some abstract fear, but a concrete reality. We can name the two women whom Petrillo deprived here of a chance to compete under lights at the Stade de France in a Paralympic semi-final: Lorraine Gomes de Aguiar of Brazil and Spain’s Nagore Folgado Garcia. Gomes is 27, Folgado just 20.
Folgado was thrilled to represent her country at the Paralympics. At two years old, a rare and aggressive cancer of the retina left her blind in her left eye and with minimal vision in her right. Beyond three feet in front of her face, she cannot see. Despite this, she once said: “I can still grow and achieve something important. I never put up barriers for myself.”