Suspicious-looking woman athletes participating in next month's Olympic Games in Beijing will be forced to take a gender test, the Chinese authorities have announced.

To ensure that girls will be girls, officials have set up a sex-determination laboratory where they say that tests will be conducted with the utmost delicacy by four experts from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital.

The hospital has spent more than a year designing the facility to ensure the minimum of embarrassment for those athletes who may be asked to prove their credentials.

China wants to avoid any disruption of the kind that marred the 2006 Asia Games in Doha when Santhi Soundarajan, the Indian middle-distance runner, was stripped of the silver medal she won in the 800 metres track event after failing a sex-determination test.

Professor Tian Qinjie has worked in the gynaecological department of the hospital for 30 years and is among China's main experts. He told state media: “Suspect athletes will be evaluated from their external appearance by experts. They will then undergo four tests, including blood tests, to examine their sex hormones, genes and chromosomes for sex determination.”

Simply to carry out external checks could provoke a negative reaction from athletes, he said. Chromosome tests may be insufficient. Thus the need for a full battery of examinations. He said: “We need to make tests in an entirely scientific manner. The purpose of sex-determination work is to ensure a more scientific, more fair and more humane system.” He said that initial results would be available within three days, although the official confirmation would require seven days.

Ewa Klobukowska, the Polish runner who took gold in the women's 4x100 metres relay and bronze in the 100 metres at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo, was the first athlete to be unmasked as a man when she failed an early form of chromosome test in 1967. She was found to have a rare genetic condition that gave her no advantage over other athletes, but was nevertheless barred from competing in the Olympics and other professional sports.

In the 1996 Atlanta Olympics eight athletes failed the tests but were all cleared in subsequent examinations.

Professor Tian explained that as many as one in 1,000 is born with gender abnormalities and are not aware of this until after reaching adulthood. He said that in many sports male athletes enjoyed an advantage in strength, speed and endurance over women. Statistics showed that in track and field the difference between the sexes ranged between 10 and 18 per cent; in speed events the difference was as much as 20 per cent.

Heidi Krieger, the shot-putter nicknamed “Hormone Heidi” who won gold at the 1986 European Championships, developed a male physique after taking drugs fed to her without her knowledge by her East German sports club. In 1997 she underwent sex-change surgery and became Andreas.

More than 10,000 athletes were given the anabolic steroid OralTurinabol over 20 years in East Germany. Between 1968 and 1976 the country won 40 Olympic gold medals.

Gender issues

— 1 in 500 gender tests is expected to reveal abnormalities

— 26 world records set by Tamara and Irina Press before the International Amateur Athletic Federation began sex testing in 1966

— 2 years the time it took for Maria Patino to clear her name after she unfairly failed a gender test in 1985

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica; Times archives

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