Distinguished is level 3 of 4 in the South Africa Hall of Fame: sustained excellence over a career, widely honoured at home. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
Two Olympic titles and three world championships over 800 metres, won while fighting a longer and more public battle over the right to compete as herself.
Mokgadi Caster Semenya won the world 800 metres title in Berlin in 2009 at eighteen, in her first season at that level. Within hours the governing body confirmed it had ordered sex testing, and the results — which should have been confidential — were discussed in newspapers around the world while she was still a teenager.
She went on to win Olympic gold in 2012 and 2016 and world titles in 2009, 2011 and 2017, and went unbeaten over 800 metres for three years.
In 2018 World Athletics introduced regulations requiring athletes with certain differences of sex development to suppress their testosterone in order to race between 400 metres and a mile. Semenya refused. The Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld the rules in 2019, accepting that they were discriminatory but holding the discrimination necessary; the Swiss Federal Supreme Court declined to overturn that. In July 2024 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights found that Switzerland had failed to give her case the rigorous judicial review her rights required — a ruling about the fairness of the process, which did not strike down the regulations themselves.
She has been unable to defend her Olympic title since 2016. She has continued to speak publicly about what was done to her, published a memoir, and become one of the most significant figures in the argument about who is allowed to be a woman in sport.
She went on to win Olympic gold in 2012 and 2016 and world titles in 2009, 2011 and 2017, and went unbeaten over 800 metres for three years.
In 2018 World Athletics introduced regulations requiring athletes with certain differences of sex development to suppress their testosterone in order to race between 400 metres and a mile. Semenya refused. The Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld the rules in 2019, accepting that they were discriminatory but holding the discrimination necessary; the Swiss Federal Supreme Court declined to overturn that. In July 2024 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights found that Switzerland had failed to give her case the rigorous judicial review her rights required — a ruling about the fairness of the process, which did not strike down the regulations themselves.
She has been unable to defend her Olympic title since 2016. She has continued to speak publicly about what was done to her, published a memoir, and become one of the most significant figures in the argument about who is allowed to be a woman in sport.
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