Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies competed against steroid-juiced East German women at the height of the Cold War doping era, but she says the current influx of biological males in women’s sports is even more unfair.
“What we’ve got now is 10 times worse because this is happening across every single sport at every single level in every single country,” said Davies, who won silver at the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
Davies spoke out during the debut of “Gaines for Girls,” an OutKick podcast hosted by All-American swimmer Riley Gaines, which launches Wednesday.
The doped-up East German athletes were dominant for a time in women’s swimming, rowing and track-and-field, she said, but male-born transgender athletes have enjoyed success across a far larger swath of women’s sports.
Besides swimming and track, it also now includes golf, powerlifting, cycling, archery, volleyball, and disc golf, as well as amateur competitions like U.K.’s popular Parkrun events.
“So even things like Parkrun in this country, which is a social event that happens at the weekend, women every single weekend in the U.K. are losing their course records to people who self-identify as women, males that are self-identifying ticking a box online,” Davies said in video shared with The Washington Times. “And we’re losing dozens of records every weekend.”
Davies, who competed in three Olympic Games for the United Kingdom, compared the situation to the heyday of East German doping, when the Soviet bloc nation would bring in sometimes-unheralded steroid-infused women.
“We would have East German athletes turning up to things like, even like the Olympics, and we’d never, ever seen them before, and they would literally arrive and smash world records,” Davies said. “They looked and sounded very masculine. They had deep voices, very large Adam’s apples, bad skin, through no fault of their own.”
Some Western athletes cried foul even then, and the masculinity of East German female athletes became a pop-culture punchline.
Davies sympathized Tuesday with the East German women, calling them “pawns of a horrible system,” and blaming the International Olympic Committee for waffling.
“The people I have a big problem with is the IOC,” Davies said. “They allowed this to happen for 20 years. They even had East German doctors sitting on international doping panels. So every time we came up with a way to try and catch them, they would find a way to avoid being caught. This was allowed to go on for two decades. So imagine the number of females that missed that.”
Congratulations to @Riley_Gaines_ on joining @Outkick to launch the new ‘Gaines for Girls’ podcast! We can’t wait to for this new chapter for Riley and the fight to #SaveWomensSports! 👏 https://t.co/E5kOw9B7Mx
— Independent Women’s Forum (@IWF) July 11, 2023
Gaines landed in the middle of the fairness-versus-inclusion debate after tying for fifth place with transgender athlete Lia Thomas in the 200 freestyle at the 2022 NCAA women’s swimming championships.
The NCAA had just one fifth-place trophy, which they awarded to Thomas, who swam for three years on the University of Pennsylvania men’s team before transitioning and switching to the women’s side.
The NCAA later mailed a duplicate trophy to Gaines, who swam for the University of Kentucky.
During the meet, Thomas became the first male-born athlete to win an NCAA Division I women’s championship, with a first-place finish in the 500 freestyle.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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