Mick Hartley

Former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies has been a long-term critic of trans women in women's sport – one of the first to speak out, and one of the first to suffer the inevitable abuse. She's interviewed by Brendan O'Neill at Spiked, who brings up the comparison with the East German women on drugs who swept the board back in the Eighties, when Davies was competing. How did she feel about that?

Frustration, that’s the word. Frustration that people are not standing up for fair sport. That people can throw women’s sport under the bus so very easily, which is exactly what happened in the 1970s and 80s.

The number of times I talk about it now and people say, ‘Oh, did you know what was going on?’. Of course we knew what was going on. It was as obvious as the nose on your face. These people would just turn up, having never raced in the junior programme. We’d never seen them before. They’d never made the usual transition from being a good junior to being a good senior – they would just arrive on the Olympic programme, or the World Championship programme, or the Europeans or wherever, and just smash the world record. And it just doesn’t happen like that.

These swimmers looked and sounded like men. They had Adam’s apples, five o’clock shadows. And, as you mentioned, they were very much the victims in this as well. Many of these girls have died since or they’ve had disabled children. Their lives have been shortened and and really debilitated because of the drugs that they were allowed to be given by the East German state. And the International Olympic Committee did nothing to stop it. It just makes me so very angry.

At the time, my dad was my coach. He had, I think, three or four people on the British Olympic team for Moscow. And I was the only individual female medalist from the whole of the British team at that particular Olympic Games. We had some relay medals, but no individual medals whatsoever. And yet he was never picked as an international coach, because he spoke out against [swimmers doping].

So it’s such a fallacy to say that we didn’t know what was going on. We did know then, just as we know now that it’s unfair to have male bodies in female sport. We don’t need to have 10 years of women losing races to know this. And that’s what makes me so terribly cross. So the word is frustration, and I’m back to being frustrated now.

I suppose I’m in a lucky position in that I’m retired – I’m not reliant on sponsorships. But having said that, I’ve lost so much work. I’ve even had charities remove my name from ambassador roles, which I’ve been with for 20 or 30 years. Because I speak out.

I’ve never been disrespectful, I believe wholeheartedly that sport is for all, and it should be inclusive. But it doesn’t have to be inclusive at the cost of another group’s right to fair sport.

Back then the sporting authorities were completely useless in standing up for women athletes. Now the sporting authorities are completely useless in standing up for women athletes. You might almost conclude that they're just completely useless all round.

And those male advantages, as possessed for instance by Lia Thomas:

First of all there’s Lia’s height. Lia was just underneath six foot four. Males are taller. Swimmers in particular are a tall race. You will find us at the Olympic Games: all the tall blokes are in the sprints, all the tall girls are in the girls’ sprints. But we’re not just underneath six foot four – most of the top female sprinters are around the five foot 11 or the six-foot mark. So there’s physiological benefits just in terms of size – including the size of your hands and the size of your feet, because these are your paddles, of course.

It’s lung capacity, too, it’s bone density, it’s muscle memory. This is 21 years of being a male. And even though Thomas identifies as a woman, Thomas is still biologically male. So even if someone has, let’s say, a 12 per cent advantage as a male over a female, and we can remove six per cent of that [by suppressing testosterone levels], you’re still giving someone a six per cent advantage.

Yet we spend millions of pounds every year, trying to stop people from doping just to get the tiniest advantage. So what actually is the point of the World Anti-Doping Agency, if we don’t care about [unfair] advantages in sports? This is the ridiculous side to it.

Ridiculous is right. It is ridiculous that so many people just don't see this.