TOKYO (AP) — Almost all feminine athletes have accomplished intercourse testing forward of the athletics world championships this month in Japan.
World Athletics mentioned Tuesday that greater than 95% p.c of exams — a genetic screening to find out the athlete’s intercourse at beginning — have been accomplished within the lead up the world championships that can happen in Tokyo starting this weekend.
The governing physique for monitor and discipline mentioned the rest of the exams — for the French and Norwegian groups and a few athletes primarily based in France, each being international locations the place genetic testing for non-medical causes is banned — might be achieved in Tokyo earlier than the beginning of the competitors.
“This has been a whole sport response to a principle that we all fundamentally believe in, which is to protect the female category,” World Athletics President Sebastian Coe mentioned.
World Athletics was the primary Olympic sport to reintroduce chromosome testing — beforehand discontinued within the Nineteen Nineties — which requires athletes who compete within the girls’s occasions to undergo the check as soon as of their careers. It introduced in March that it permitted the introduction of cheek swabs and dry blood-spot exams for feminine athletes to be able to keep “the integrity of competition.”
World Athletics had set a deadline of Sept. 1 for athletes to undergo the gene exams prematurely of the world championships.
Final month, the governing physique for Olympic-style boxing introduced it might require intercourse testing for all fighters wishing to compete within the girls’s division at its world championships this month in Liverpool, England.
