AFTER A PAINFUL BATTLE AROUND HER GENDER THAT SPARKED GLOBAL HEADLINES AND ROCKED THE WORLD OF ATHLETICS, THE OLYMPIC GOLD-MEDALLIST RUNNER IS TELLING HER STORY IN HER OWN WORDS
CASTER SEMENYA’S STORY IS ONE OF hard-earned confidence, and peace of mind, after years of personal and professional storms. When we meet in a large room on the top floor of a nondescript hotel in central London, the world-class athlete is a picture of warmth and openness. She is dressed simply, in a white vest top and checked shorts that almost reach her knees. Her black hair is neatly cornrowed back from smooth skin and delicate features. She has a diamond stud in her ear, rings on her fingers and a necklace with a symbol of her post-run victory cobra pose dangling across her chest.
Semenya exudes a self-acceptance that says she will not be rocked by anybody, especially people she doesn’t know or care for. And it’s precisely in this way that the 32-year-old is approaching telling her story for the first time, in her own words, with the release of her memoir, The Race To Be Myself, which will be published later this month.
Her candidness is surprising, not least because for years the media has picked apart her image, hounded her friends and family, and has arguably been instrumental in helping to dismantle her career as one of the greatest runners in modern history. Among countless other titles, she has won three World Championship gold medals and two Olympic gold medals in the 800m race from 2009 to 2017, until her career was cut short by a storm of controversy around her gender instigated by the sport’s governing body and its rules concerning testosterone levels.
‘I want people to understand that, yes, I am an athlete on the field. I’m a well-known person,’ she says, with her trademark wide, slightly lopsided grin. ‘But, in my house, I’m a parent, I’m a wife, and all these things.’ She spreads her arm across the table to illustrate her point. ‘If you accept yourself, you love yourself, you appreciate yourself and then you give yourself enough respect. It’s easy for people to give you that,’ she says.
Semenya was born Mokgadi Caster Semenya in the South African province of Limpopo, and grew up in the cradle of two tiny village communities, Ga-masehlong and Fairlie, which, she writes, ‘accepted me as I was and never made me feel like an outsider’. She keeps a close, tight friendship circle. ‘I’m a very, very private person, but I keep the friends that have been there for me,’ she says. ‘If I know you, that doesn’t mean I’m your friend. But those ones that I grew up with in the village? They’re still my friends.’ She refers to the spirit of ‘Ubuntu’, a Bantu term that means humanity, or, more evocatively, ‘I am because we are’.
