Lord Coe is leading a proposal for rule changes over gender-verification tests by which athletes who are in the situation in which Caster Semenya, of South Africa, found herself in Berlin could be asked to stand down, temporarily, from racing.

“We can never allow this to happen in this way ever again,” Coe, a vice-president of the IAAF, said of the fallout from the 800 metres gold medal that Semenya won at the World Championships in Berlin last month. Where there is evidence, albeit inconclusive, that an athlete may have a competitive advantage due to a gender issue, Coe said: “We need to be able to say, ‘I’m sorry, interim findings tell us that we have an issue and this issue cannot be played out in a major championship.’ ”

Coe said that this would be done to protect two groups, the first of which is the athlete herself. “We have to protect the athlete from the risk of entering a championship and having this exploding all around them,” he said.

But he is also concerned about fair play in the sporting landscape itself. “We have to maintain confidence for girls to come into the sport and to think that they are competing on a level playing field,” he said.

Coe will be discussing this issue with the other IAAF vice-presidents on the federation’s advisory board and their recommendations will then be presented to the IAAF Council at its next meeting in November. There is a suggestion also that Coe may travel with Lamine Diack, the IAAF president, on his proposed forthcoming visit to South Africa to resolve the situation in which Semenya now finds herself.

Coe said that while Semenya’s gender-verification process is still under way, he was concerned generally that an athlete with an intersex condition could “rewrite the sport overnight”.

He referred to his own improvement curve, whereby his 800 metres personal-best time, between the age of 18 and its peak, improved by six seconds. The women’s world 800 metres record is 1min 53.28sec and only ten women have run within two seconds of it.

Semenya is 18 and if she makes progress equivalent to Coe’s, she would end up beating the women’s world record by nearly four seconds.

“We are the stewards of the sport and we have to protect it,” Coe said, insisting again that this was a general reference and not a comment on Semenya herself.

“You cannot have a situation where a medical condition gives such an unnatural advantage to a competitor. Can you imagine the impact of that kind of progression being made by somebody with this kind of condition? A whole generation of female competitors could be sitting there saying, ‘This is not worth the candle.’ ”

The solutions, he said, are twofold. The first is administrative, whereby the IAAF would be granted the power to withdraw an athlete from competition in cases where gender-verification test results had not been completed, but where initial indications were that there may be an issue. “We have to be able to make judgments on an interim situation,” Coe said.

“The difficulty for us is that this is a complicated medical area, the work you need to do is over months and that doesn’t work for an international federation at a major championship.

“If we want to protect an athlete, we need to be in a position where we can act when an interim or initial investigation throws up an issue rather than this being something that you are trying to deal with in the pressured, often highly emotional environment of a championship.” The other solution, Coe insisted, was an open debate.

“One of the problems we had was that we don’t actually have a mature or open discussion about this,” he said. “This has been the taboo, not just in track and field or in sport; it is a societal taboo.

“You want to protect the confidentiality of the athlete, but we were doing it against the backdrop of a subject that frankly no one really wants to discuss in an open or sensible way. It is the kind of conversation that you have tucked away in corners of offices. There needs to be a broader discussion here. We have to get away from the elephant in the room.”