World Athletics Mandates Cheek Swabs to Protect Female Sports

World Athletics is the governing body for track and field events including those held at the Olympics. Today the group announced that it will introduce a cheek swab to verify that everyone competing in women’s events are biological women.

Just days after losing the battle to become president of the International Olympic Committee, Seb Coe is back in action as president of World Athletics and, speaking at the close of the governing body’s latest council meeting, he said “pre-clearance tests” will be introduced soon for female athletes.

These will include cheek-swab or dry blood tests and will be non-invasive. They will only be necessary once in an athlete’s career, too. New regulations, he added, will be drafted in coming weeks with the chance the tests could be introduced ahead of the World Championships in Tokyo in September.

Coe said: “It’s important to do it because it maintains everything that we’ve been talking about, and particularly recently, about not just talking about the integrity of female women’s sport, but actually guaranteeing it. We feel this is a really important way of providing confidence and maintaining that absolute focus on the integrity of competition.

“We will doggedly protect the female category, and we’ll do whatever is necessary to do it.”

Coe had been at the forefront of taking on this issue for several years. World Athletics had already limited women’s races to biological women but the new rule will change the eligibility of people with rare genetic differences that give them an advantage.

Mr. Coe, an unsuccessful candidate in the recent election to lead the International Olympic Committee, has been a polarizing force in his zeal on this issue. The debate over women’s eligibility criteria has led to pitched battles — mostly played out in the bear pit of social media — over who has the right to compete. Track since 2023 has banned transgender athletes from women’s competition.

The new rules eliminate from women’s competition a minority of athletes who do not have the typical female XX sex chromosomes, and have one of several conditions that together are known as differences in sex development, or DSD. Such people can be female to outward appearances, and in some do not know they have DSD. But their unusual genetics can result in high levels of testosterone, and possibly greater muscular development, giving them some of the athletic advantage that men have.

Track and field has been at the forefront of the debate since the South African runner Caster Semenya exploded into the public consciousness by winning gold in the 800 meters at a world championships in 2009. Her victory prompted a backlash from rivals who complained about Ms. Semenya’s appearance, leading to the governing body at the time ordering sex tests. At issue was a rare trait giving her naturally elevated levels of testosterone.

She won gold at the London Olympics in 2012, and again at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016, when all three medalists in the women’s 800 meters were all athletes with DSD.

As mentioned, Coe was campaigning to be the next president of the International Olympic Committee; however, he lost out to Kirsty Coventry, an Olympic swimming champion from Zimbabwe. Coventry has taken a similar, if somewhat less aggressive, stance on the issue:

The Athletic: One of the big stories at the Paris Games last summer was the controversy surrounding Algeria’s boxing gold medallist Imane Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting, who were banned by the sport’s suspended international federation for reportedly failing gender-eligibility tests but then cleared to fight by the IOC. There is no evidence that either of them is transgender but they became lightning rods in the debate about transgender athletes and women’s sport. What would you do to avoid a storm like that blowing up again?

Coventry: The international federations have had the major role in the rules around transgender athletes. I think the IOC should bring everyone into a room and hash it out. For some international federations, like equestrian, men and women compete against each other, so it’s not high on their agenda, but the IOC needs to take a leading role. I don’t think we need to redo all the work that’s been done but we can learn from the international federations, come up with a framework and set up a task force that will look at this constantly and consistently. The overarching principle must be to protect the female category.

The follow through on that could take a bit of time but it seems to be where things are heading. Here’s Sebastian Coe making his statements in response to questions from a reporter.

World Athletics has announced they will verify sex via cheek swabs at the elite level. Good!

Cheek swabs are:
– non-invasive
– cheap
– effective
– necessary for ensuring fairness for female athletes@NCAA should follow suit pic.twitter.com/ivbgEfdJYq

— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) March 25, 2025