The unhappy predicament of Caster Semenya, the 800-metre winner in the World Athletics Championships who is to be tested to establish whether she is too masculine to compete as a woman, is reminiscent of the nudges and winks that dogged successful women athletes in the 1930s.

After the 1934 British Empire Games, Alexandrine Gibb, head of the Women’s Amateur Athletic Federation of Canada, complained of having to comfort a “dressing room full of Canadian girls weeping because they had to toe the mark against girls who shaved and spoke in mannish tones!”

“I quite often thought I heard a man’s voice behind me, only to find it was a woman,” was how the British high jumper, Dorothy Odam, recalled her time in the women’s training area at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

She was right first time in the case of Germany’s high-jump specialist, Dora Ratjen. She was really Hermann Ratjen, cajoled by the Hitler Youth into becoming a sporting transvestite for the good of German medals table supremacy. The hapless Ratjen came fourth and was later arrested at Magdeburg station when police were alerted to a passenger wearing a skirt and five o’clock shadow.

At the 1936 Olympics both the winner and the runner-up in the women’s 100 metres were widely assumed to be men. Poland’s Stanislawa Walasiewicz — known to the US press as Stella Walsh or “Stella the Fella” — came second. In 1980 she was accidentally caught in the crossfire of a bank robbery and the resulting autopsy suggested she was a hermaphrodite.

She had been beaten to the tape in 1936 by the 6ft Missouri farm girl, Helen Stephens. Unperturbed by the rumours circulating about Stephens, Hitler gave her an affectionate squeeze. Through his interpreter, the Führer suggested that “Fräulein should consider running for Germany. Fair hair, blue eyes. Strong big woman”, and invited her to spend the weekend with him in Berchtesgaden. She settled instead for his autograph.

Although Stephens had passed a full body inspection, in 1937, Look magazine splashed a photo of her with the caption “Is This a Man or a Woman?” She successfully sued. But there is no pleasing everyone. Her student scholarship was revoked because of the disgrace the Olympic gold medallist brought upon William Woods College when she posed for the press while dressed as a cocktail waitress.

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