Caster Semenya keeps her medal

A top 10 for a pre-Thanksgiving Thursday:

1. South Africa's sports ministry on Thursday issued a statement saying that Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old women's 800-meter world champion in Berlin, had forged an agreement with track and field's world governing body to keep her gold medal, her title and her prize money.

If the ministry hoped by issuing such a statement that the matter would now go away and Semenya could get back the dignity someone in that position is due, every measure of it -- it seems difficult to see how that could be the case.

Why? Because, for instance, whether Semenya will be allowed to keep competing as a woman, and whether she can -- or would be able to do so -- remains entirely unclear. The ministry statement, for instance, does not say.

An Australian newspaper, citing an unnamed source, reported in September that Semenya had both male and female sexual characteristics.

Athletics South Africa said last month it had suspended its president, Leonard Chuene, and the rest of his board; Chuene in September had issued an apology for denying that he had known about gender-verification tests done on Semenya before the Berlin worlds.

The ministry statement said it had asked track's governing body, the IAAF, for an apology. The IAAF is "adamant," the ministry said, that "the public discourse" about Semenya "did not originate with them."

The Associated Press reported that the IAAF had accepted Chuene's resignation from the IAAF's policy-making council and had opened a formal inquiry into the way he and Athletics South Africa handled the Semenya matter.

In a blog published Thursday, Jill Geer, USA Track & Field's thoughtful spokeswoman, wrote of the matter, "How the story was leaked and how it has played out has done nothing but tarnish the reputations of everyone involved. Regardless of what went on behind the scenes, who knew what and when, who did what examination or who leaked what to whom, this has played out like a Greek tragedy of Sophoclean proportions. The victims include, in no particular order, Semenya, her competitors and anyone in society who is, to use a term often employed in gender studies, 'other.'"

Geer also notes, "Also working against [Semenya] was the fact that she is coached by a man who [according to accounts published in Britain] 'was named as a key figure in the East German doping machine in a German parliamentary inquiry (and who) has admitted his involvement in the drug programme...' Indeed, the East German connection and her subsequent, incredible improvement in performance is why the IAAF first raised eyebrows about her performances in 2009, not because of how she looked."

Permit me at this point to repeat what I wrote from Berlin in August: "... Caster Semenya is 18 years old. Imagine if you had an 18-year-old and this was your child."

2. More sparked by Semenya: The Times reports that every other day a baby in Britain is born "looking different enough that doctors can not instantly tell its sex." Also: "... for 1 in 4,000 expectant parents a year, there is no answer to that first question: is it a boy or a girl?" And: "That almost certainly someone you know has started off his or her life like this..."

3. Tyson Gay and Sanya Richards on Thursday were named winners of USA Track & Field's Jesse Owens awards, and while end-of-season awards typically aren't much to write about, this instance proves the exception to the rule.

Gay didn't run a 9.58 in the 100 meters or 19.19 in the 200. Usain Bolt did at the world championships in Berlin, and everyone knows that.

But lost in the glare of what Bolt did is that Bolt did all that in part because Gay was pushing him. In July, Gay ran a 9.77. Then, at those world championships, Gay ran 9.71, and on a groin so sore he could hardly make it up all of one step to the riser at a news conference afterward. Finally, in Shanghai in September, Gay ran 9.69.

He also ran a 19.58 in the 200 back in May in New York.

It's obviously the case but no less worth pointing out that it would be an event well worth waiting for were a healthy Gay and a healthy Bolt to line it up. But given the way track and field works, that might not be until the next world championships, in 2011.

Richards, meantime, finally won an individual 400 world title, winning in Berlin with ease. She finished the season with the four fastest women's 400 times in the world in 2009.

4. Michael Phelps went to Europe and did not win.

Phelps was swimming in an old-style swimsuit. Pretty much everyone else was swimming in the high-tech suits that won't be allowed anymore past Jan. 1, the suits that help humans swim like otters.

Some of the sky-is-falling sort of headlines and stories about Phelps not winning thus bordered on comical.

Relax: It's late in the year in 2009, off-season in a non-Olympic year. And the 2012 Olympics aren't until 2012.

At any rate, Phelps took second in the 200 individual medley at a short-course meet in Berlin. That's outrageously good, considering the little training he'd done and what he was swimming in.

Oh, and this: Everyone else is going to find out early next year just how hard it is to swim in the so-called textile suits. What if Phelps and coach Bob Bowman are already two months ahead of the game?

5. Most American sportswriters with an interest in the Olympics focused last week on Skate America in Lake Placid, N.Y., where Kim Yu-Na of South Korea and Evan Lysacek of the United States won the women's and men's competitions.

Another focus: the World Cup ski events in Levi, Finland, where Lindsey Vonn took second in the slalom by a mere eight-hundredths of a second, and Bode Miller got whapped in the nose by a gate in his first race back.

Figure skating traditionally drives ratings at a Winter Olympics. Moreover, Vonn is clearly going to be one of the big stories up to and through the Games, as is Miller (albeit for very different reasons).

For those interested in another aspect of the Games -- overall, how is the American team going to do in Vancouver? -- an intriguing suggestion came not from Lake Placid or Levi but from Beitostoelen, Norway.

There, Kikkan Randall took fourth in the women's 5k and Kris Freeman tenth in a 10k in pre-World Cup cross-country ski racing.

The only way the U.S. team can ever win the medals count at a Winter Games is to win medals in events it historically has not done well in -- the Nordic events, cross-country and biathlon.

Intriguingly, conditions in Beitostoelen included rain -- maybe the same sort of weather that might settle on Canada's west coast this coming February.

6. Georges St. Pierre, the UFC welterweight champ, says he might try to make the Canadian Olympic wrestling team for the 2012 Summer Games in London.

Dude, go for it. Let's see what you've got.

7. British security minister Alan West says the 2012 Games mark "possibly the greatest security challenge the U.K. has faced since the Second World War."

Yikes.

8. Assuming we make it past 2012 and get to 2016, here is must-reading from the Economist, a special report on Brazil.

9. Michael Payne, the International Olympic Committee's former marketing director who served as a senior adviser to Rio's winning 2016 bid, has written a fantastic analysis about why it won. It's required reading for anyone anywhere in the world mulling a future bid.

The full article is published in the December/January edition of SportsPro, a British magazine. An excerpt can be found here.

(Disclaimer: In the full piece, Payne quotes from one of my prior UniversalSports.com columns on the 2016 election. I had no idea he was going to do so.)

Here's the sort of thing you get in the excerpt you can find online: "It was a surprise to watch a real and legendary political machine so finely tuned and experienced as Chicago – who prided themselves, as no other US city, on their ability to manage elections, telling people how they are going to vote before they even approach the polling station – so totally miss the plot. As the 18-vote first round so clearly showed, Chicago totally failed at the very first rule of elections; they never really understood the electorate and how to communicate with them."

There's so much more in the full article.

For instance, this, about Brazilian President Lula, an avid Rio 2016 supporter: "President Lula did not just come to the IOC Evaluation Commission once, but three times. He did not just write a general letter to the IOC membership but wrote 110 individual, personal letters and had his Ambassadors deliver them by hand. Lula made a point of extending his stay in London after the G20 meetings, to go out to the Olympic Park and meet with Olympic officials.

"The time and energy Lula devoted to understanding the Olympic Movement gave him an inside track and a better feel of which strings to pull and buttons to press with the IOC -- something that President Obama and other politicians flying in minutes before his presentation could never hope to achieve."

Also, there's this: "It was with a remarkable stroke of irony that the new president of the USOC, Larry Probst, stood before the IOC session in Copenhagen, and promised to be the IOC's best partner. Nobody believed him!"

10. If you're Twittering -- and if you not, you should be -- you absolutely should be following Evan Morgenstein, the sports agent who represents, among others, swimmer Dara Torres. His commentary is often raw, unfiltered and politically incorrect. It's also hilarious and refreshingly honest.

A sample: "what the USOC needs is not new leadership.. it needs an old fashion house cleaning!"

Find him here.