Atypicality, Advantage, and Elite Sport: Moving from a Fairness to a Disability Justice Framework

American swimmer Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian of all time, described as having “the perfect body for swimming," due to what commentators refer to as “his proportionally longer wingspan.” Hundreds of sports journalists, commentators, coaches, and journal articles note the unique—one could use the phrase “abnormal” or “atypical”—length of Phelps’ arms as a major factor in his success. Analysts, journalists, and commentators concur that Phelps’ armspan, as a swimmer, are not just a fun fact, but confer upon Phelps a physical advantage that is regularly cited to explain his incredible competitiveness and success. Caster Semenya holds the third-fastest time for the women’s 800 meter sprint. While she holds fewer international elite records than Phelps, those she earned rendered her vulnerable to over a decade of international scrutiny surrounding the legitimacy of her status as a woman athlete, due to the fact that Semenya has a condition which can affect the body’s production and levels of testosterone. While numerous scholars note that testosterone levels have an undetermined effect on performance (Jordan-Young and Karkazis 2019), this endogenous, atypical feature of Semenya’s body has been ruled “an unfair advantage” used to permanently disqualify her from international competition. While many would argue that Semenya and Phelps are incomparable because they compete in different categories of sport, each of their successes is attributed—correctly or incorrectly—to unique and endogenous physical characteristics. This paper considers the gendered and racialized politics of physical atypicality in elite sport, arguing that atypicality is used to police and compress the physiological domain of womanhood eligible for competition while expanding the physiological domain of manhood. It argues that we should draw from disability frameworks rather than fairness frameworks to assign meaning to atypical physiological configurations of femininity or womanhood in athletics, which would expand, rather than limit, the domain of the forms of womanhood eligible for participation in sport. This approach would be responsive to both physiological experiences of cisgender womanhood in a way that would prevent cis women with, i.e., higher-than-average testosterone levels from participating while also creating pathways into elite sport for transgender women.