Later, in bed, like twentysomethings the world over, you defer sleep with your phone: scrolling through selfies on WeChat, video essays on bilibili, and microcelebrity meltdowns on Weibo. When you open the photosharing app, RedNote, one post catches your eye.

“You’re awake,” the title reads. “It’s ‘08 in a Beijing alley, and the Olympics are set to begin.”

The images flicker through dimly remembered scenes from childhood: cluttered newspaper stands, roadside skewer vendors, kindergarten kids in bright tank tops. Prominently featured are the Fuwa, the five adorable multicolored mascots of the 2008 Olympics. The posts have gnomic, melancholy titles (“Why cry? Wasn’t this the life you always wanted?” or “Never to find those happy days again”) that serve as little daggers to the Gen Z heart.

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But what really gets you — what really sets off the Sehnsucht in your bosom for the lost dreamworld of childhood — is the music. “Beijing Welcomes You”, the old Olympic anthem, is a soaring, catchy ballad that can crack the cool facade of even the most stoic of Chinese Zoomers. Its lyrics (“Open, always, is the gate of my home…”) capture a China that was confident, cosmopolitan, and welcoming; a China that now seems as forgotten as the threadbare plushies of our childhood.

What gives the song such emotional significance is the sheer breadth of its saturation. In the Summer of 2008, you heard it broadcast on the bus ride to school; on a walk with your parents in the park; as you snuck into the cornershop to buy red bean popsicles.

It’s clear from all the comments that the rediscovery of “Beijing Welcomes You” is, for China’s Gen Z, only part of a wider reckoning with the recent past. “In those days we all believed in progress and world peace…” writes one poster on bilibi (China’s YouTube analog). “This song has such pure intentions; there’s no political agenda to it at all. Culture above all else…” adds another. A reply to this notes that the star-studded cast features A-listers from both shores of the Taiwan Strait, as well as the Chinese diaspora: “Back then, everyone set aside their ideologies and national differences to showcase to the world nothing other than Chinese civilization and the Olympic spirit… Truly, those were the good times.” Without getting lost in the vexed politico-linguistic question of Chinese autonyms, it’s notable here that the commenter uses the term “中华文化” (Zhōnghuá wénhuà) for Chinese civilization, which has the expansive sense of an overarching culture spanning all Chinese-speaking people, as opposed to the more parochial “中国文化” (Zhōngguó wénhuà), which refers to Chinese culture within the People’s Republic. Such are the linguistic pains taken by the user to emphasize the ecumenism of Chinese unity manifested during the 2008 Olympics.

British readers might feel a pang of recognition at the potency of Olympic patriotism; images from the London 2012 opening ceremony are still apt to prompt wistful accounts from progressives about the forward-looking, multicultural, welcoming country they thought they grew up in. But whereas Britain’s Olympic games live on in cultural memory as the last gasp of liberal Britain, Beijing 2008 was supposed to be the inauguration of a newer, more open China — a China that never was.

The aesthetic that Chinese Zoomers have fashioned in response to these foreclosed hopes is a variation on “dreamcore”, a style that first took shape on US-based platforms like Tumblr and DeviantArt in the mid-2010s. American dreamcore is marked by its obsession with eerie liminal spaces like hotel lobbies, parking lots, or the yellow, fluorescent-lit basements of old furniture stores that inspired Backrooms, this summer’s horror blockbuster. Chinese dreamcore retains some of the formal elements — eerily empty streets, 2000s internet graphics — while sinicizing its content; this is, in other words, nostalgia with Chinese characteristics. It could even be seen as further confirmation of the late Mark Fisher’s pet concept, hauntology, the idea that we’re living now in the “slow cancellation of the future”, surrounded by the dreams we once abandoned.

That the Chinese youth are just as pessimistic, anxious, even fatalistic, about the present state of affairs as young people in the West may come as a surprise. From Friedrich Merz to Mark Carney, politicians on both the Left and Right often invoke China as the presumptive winner in our global return to bipolar Great Power geopolitics — the country with the technology, infrastructure, jobs, growth rates, and above all, the sense of collective purpose buoyed by national unity. But behind the phalanxes of dancing robots and ribbons of high-speed rail is the stark economic reality facing the generation now coming of age, who, like their counterparts in the West, are coming to terms with the closure of the guaranteed upward mobility that their parents enjoyed.

In the late Seventies, China’s then-leader Deng Xiaoping implemented a wildly ambitious suite of market reforms. As Deng overhauled the creaky Soviet-style economy that he had inherited from Mao, a corresponding ideological makeover of the Chinese Communist Party was inevitable. Gone was the fiery Marxist-Leninist exporter of international revolution, replaced by the staid, technocratic guardian of state capitalism we’re familiar with today. Jettisoning the Mao-era baggage, however, meant losing the story that gave the Communist government its legitimacy — the grand Us vs Them narrative of the working class as co-authored by Marx and Engels, a story second only to the New Testament in its ability to form social cohesion and inspire mass action.

What narrative could fill the ideological vacuum left by Marxism? Political scientist Feng Chen argues that the CCP’s pivot to “eudaemonic legitimacy” accomplished precisely that. Here, eudaimonia, Greek for happiness or flourishing, refers not to any lofty Aristotelian actualizing of human potentialities, but to satisfying people’s demands for iPhones, McDonald’s, electric cars, hotpots, Korean beauty products, and so on. The result was a tacit social contract that “led the masses to link their assessment of the regime to their personal material advancement”. In the post-Mao period, political legitimacy depends on the uninterrupted economic growth that allows the government to deliver the (literal) goods.

One shortcoming of deploying eudaemonic legitimacy as a long-term political strategy is that it’s crassly reductive. Human beings are more than rational self-maximizers; man does not live by designer handbags alone. We have an exasperating tendency to put forth moral, not just material, demands — and when these moral demands are unmet, political stability falters. For Chen, eudaemonic legitimacy depends not only on delivering economic growth to the people, but also on ensuring that those people adhere to a notion of morality that is itself narrowly economic.

In the Mao era, moral character meant subscribing to a mix of proletarian solidarity, anti-imperialism, and ascetic self-discipline. A capitalist China required, at minimum, an abandonment of these collectivist socialist ideals — and, ideally, something to replace them. From the late Nineties, Chinese media saw a number of happiness campaigns — deliberately engineered self-help movements involving everything from TV talk therapy to positivity gurus to a torrent of translated American self-help paperbacks. The plan, as the anthropologist Jie Yang documents, was to inculcate new values in Chinese society — values such as “self-care, self-realization, and self-enterprise”, enabling the Chinese people to positively affirm themselves as autonomous agents, happily engaged in private enterprise.

So as the government delivered on economic growth, the governed reconceived of the good life along exactly such lines. What could go wrong?

The more basic problem with the quid pro quo of political acquiescence for material gain is what to do when growth tapers off. In the popular Chinese consciousness, the tapering took place sometime between 2018 and the beginning of the pandemic, and the record-breaking 17.9% youth unemployment rate recorded in July evinces no change to this downward trend. Attitudes, though, can be slower to change than economic realities, and a distinct generational gap has opened between the Deng cohort, who maintain a sunny and increasingly obsolescent optimism that comes only with decades of double-digit GDP growth, and their children, who are now faced with a job market decimated by outsourcing, automation, and cutthroat competition. In response to this future of secular stagnation, Gen Z has rejected en masse the chipper self-help morality of China’s boom years.

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In the absence of civil society — and in the face of continued state-sponsored optimism campaigns — China’s youth has vented its dissatisfaction in the only direction available: inwards. The ethnographer Dino Ge Zhang has coined the term “Sinopessimism” to characterize the private world conjured up by the slang of Chinese Zoomers. They describe their time in higher education and the workforce with the term 内卷 (“involution)”, or “the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless”. The natural reaction to an involuted society is 躺平 (“lying flat”): in other words rejecting expectations of upward mobility and career advancement in favor of alternative lifestyles.

However, Gen Z’s most distinctive neologism must be 历史的垃圾时间, or “garbage time of history”. The term, coined by Hu Wenhui, a newspaper editor in Guangzhou, borrows its meaning from “garbage time” in sports, referring to the final portion of a match so lopsided that its outcome is already a foregone conclusion. Hu, in a 2023 WeChat post shared millions of times, extends this to cultural critique: those living in the “garbage time of history” are stuck in an agonizing interim period when nothing seems to work, when decaying, outmoded social structures refuse to collapse, and when individuals feel powerless to respond. Though Hu limits his examples to the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union and the fall of the Tang dynasty (while making thinly-veiled allusions to contemporary China throughout), it’s written in the same spirit of global pessimism that moves Western Zoomers to drop the term “late capitalism”, or the Gramsci quote that diagnoses the present as the “time of monsters”.

Nothing expresses the ennui of the Sinopessimism generation better than Chinese dreamcore. Time will tell if it remains a trendy hashtag or develops into a full-fledged artistic movement. But for now, if nothing else, Chinese dreamcore stands as a melancholy corrective to the widely-held assumption that the passing of the globalized era (which counts, as one of its fading triumphs, the Beijing Olympics) also heralds a new epoch of winners and losers: namely the oft-repeated narrative of China’s inevitable rise, and the West’s gradual decline. It seems misguided, to say the least, for Western progressives to spread narratives of Chinamaxxing at a time when the Chinese youth are themselves avoiding their economic present by escaping to the safety of the past. Ultimately, this new epoch of isolationism may consist only of losers and other losers.

If there’s any doubt about the crisis in China’s youth outlook, take a look at the panicky, hectoring responses it has elicited from the establishment. Discussion of “lying flat” is censored online; meanwhile a battalion of mainstream academics have come forth with thinkpieces rebutting the concept, decrying it as a “fraudulent academic concept,” a “logical fallacy,” or, my particular favorite, the “absurd fantasy” of “idiotic literary youths.” And, in direct response to Chinese dreamcore, a recent article published in the Social Sciences Review of Gansu Province warns of the “latent ideological risks stemming from the glorification of ‘negative emotions’”. More than just a case of bad vibes, officials are treating the pervasive pessimism as a serious ideological challenge — the one really obvious lesson from the 20th century being, after all, that keeping around a bunch of nihilistic, directionless, and economically downward young people tends to be really, really bad for political stability.

Still, one comment under a Chinese dreamcore post stood out to me as a corrective to the idea that China’s recent past really was so much brighter. It was from a bewildered Gen-Xer. “The 2000s were a time when I was scared to leave the house at night, back when trash piled in the streets, and my hometown didn’t even have streetlights. I don’t know where exactly the romance is.” So even the golden years of childhood prove no escape. If Western pundits idealize a non-existent future for China, its youth romanticize a non-existent Chinese past. All attempts at escape turn up only dead ends. How, then, can we comfort ourselves amidst this time of monsters? Perhaps there is a slender hope: that one day, with enough distance, our present may also be misremembered as beautiful.

It looked like a man punching a woman because, according to the International Boxing Association, Khelif is not a woman. In 2023, Khelif was disqualified from the World Boxing Championships along with Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting  — “a result of their failure to meet the eligibility criteria for participating in the women’s competition”. This decision was based, not on testosterone levels, but on “a separate and recognised test, whereby the specifics remain confidential”.

A Russian-language statement (the IBA is Russian-led) put it more bluntly: “Based on the results of DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to deceive their colleagues and pretended to be women. Based on the results of the tests, it was proven that they have XY chromosomes.” Lin did not appeal, while Khelif initiated an appeal and then withdrew it, meaning that in both cases, the judgement became legally binding.

But not binding on the Olympics, which withdrew recognition from the IBA earlier this year over multiple concerns over governance. That means the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is free to apply its own rules on sex categories in sport. IOC spokesperson Mark Adams warned against starting a “witch hunt… These are regular athletes who have competed for many years in boxing; they are entirely eligible and they are women on their passports.”

Which would be a totally acceptable way to classify sex, if the fight was between passports, rather than two bone-and-sinew bodies. Khelif is apparently not female, in a category designed for female athletes. And while the IOC has been keen to emphasise that this controversy is wholly unrelated to the contentious matter of trans women in sport, that is an impossible separation to maintain. The question of how sex should be defined — by chromosomes, by hormone levels or by legal marker on a passport — is the heart of the argument over inclusion.

What happened in the ring in Paris is a riposte to all the absurd claims that sex is immaterial to athletic performance. Witness, for example, the writers Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis, who argued in a 2012 New York Times op-ed for “letting go of the idea that the ultimate goal of a fair policy is to protect the ‘purity’ of women’s competitions”. If inclusion is the objective, “then sex-segregated competition is just one of many possible options, and in many cases it might not be the best one”.

And anyway, doesn’t the enforcement of sex categories simply re-instil bad old stereotypes about female weakness and vulnerability? That, at least, is what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) believes. “Excluding women who are trans hurts all women,” says the organisation’s self-identified factsheet on sports. “It invites gender policing that could subject any woman to invasive tests or accusations of being ‘too masculine’ or ‘too good’ at their sport to be a ‘real’ woman.” History professor Johanna Mellis even suggested in The Guardian that women’s sports categories might have been invented by men “to limit our athletic success and opportunities by reinforcing sexist notions of cisgender girls and women as the ‘weaker, slower sex’”.

From there, it’s a short distance to travel to the often-repeated claim that, as an article in LGBTQ+ magazine Them put it, sex differences should be viewed “much like the way we view Michael Phelps’s abnormal wingspan”. Athletes are, by definition, physical exceptions. A male person who has been legally recognised as female is simply another example of biological variation, and — claimed sports correspondent Jonathan Liew (now of The Guardian, but then writing in The Independent) — perhaps one to be celebrated: he claimed that, “in a way, it would be inspiring” if trans women came to dominate women’s sport.

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So far, chromosomes notwithstanding, Khelif has not dominated women’s boxing. XY chromosomes notwithstanding, Khelif lost in the quarter-final of the Tokyo Olympics to Kellie Harrington of Ireland, who went on to take the gold: BBC 5 Live boxing analyst Steve Bunce pointed out that Khelif is “not a devastating puncher” and has ever only achieved five stoppages. The implication, perhaps, is that Carini could have fought on, and maybe even beaten Khelif if she’d been good enough. Maybe so.

But genetically male athletes do not only become a problem in women’s sport when they’re successful. Every XY athlete “included” means an XX athlete pushed out. In combat or collision sports, they also imperil the female athletes they compete against. According to the organisation Women in Sport, male athletes have (on average) 40-50% greater upper limb strength and 12kg more skeletal muscle mass when compared to age-matched female athletes at any given body weight.

A technically accomplished woman might win a fight against a man, but the risk of injury she takes in the process is immense. So Casini had every right to weigh her own safety. After the bout, she said: “It could have been the match of a lifetime, but I had to preserve my life as well in that moment.” Boxing is inherently dangerous — but there is a very different level of exposure in agreeing to be punched by another woman, and agreeing to be punched by a man.

This is the difference that proponents of eliminating sex categories in sport cannot acknowledge. Some, like Liew, may tacitly accept it while being fundamentally unconcerned about what that would mean in practice for women in sport — perhaps because they consider women’s sport to be fundamentally unserious. (“Sometimes we forget that there are bigger things than sport,” wrote Liew in his Independent piece, which is not an observation he ever appears to have made about men’s sport.)

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But for others, particularly for women, and perhaps most particularly for women who are not actively involved in physical pursuits, there is a kind of hope in this denialism. They would like to believe that women’s physical disadvantage compared to men really is a purely, or at least largely, social phenomenon. They recognise women’s inferior status, and they understand that this is tied to the body; but they believe that the body is the cause of the inferiority, and so the body becomes politically inconvenient. They choose instead a tactful fiction of physiological equality — if not in the here and now, then in the inclusive Jerusalem to come.

The female body can, certainly, do more than the male authorities who run sports have historically liked to believe: there is a long and weird tradition of claiming that exercise will cause a woman’s uterus to fall out. Given fair access to training and competition (something which is still very far from assured), women do become faster, stronger, more aggressive. I know this from personal experience. I started powerlifting in my late thirties, and in my forties can pull weights I once thought cartoonishly huge. But I also know that the same weights pulled by a man would be much less impressive, which is why comparing myself to men tells me nothing at all about my progression.

Mixed-sex sports simply lead to exceptional women being forced out by mediocre men: brute strength besting accomplishment. The Olympics’ failure to protect women’s sport is a tragedy for female athletes, but it also makes a travesty of the competition overall. What should be a celebration of excellence becomes, through the IOC’s contempt for fairness and safety in women’s sport, the elevation of the mediocre. After decades of obfuscation and inanity over gender and sport, the truth of it all became clear in an entirely unnecessary meeting: between an apparently male fist and a female face.

A few days before her hearing, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I 500-yard women’s freestyle race was won by an athlete named Lia Thomas. Looking at the medal presentation photographs afterwards, you don’t have to be a biologist to see that something is amiss. Huddled together on the right-hand side, on the number three podium, are three young women. The number two position is empty. To the left stands the winner, on the first place podium: to my eyes, a strapping lad, albeit in female attire and with long hair. I clearly have no hope of a place on the Supreme Court.

Lia Thomas, born William Thomas, has undoubtedly had an impressive swimming career. William started competing from the age of five, was All-American in high school and went on to follow in his older brother’s footsteps by swimming for the University of Pennsylvania. For three years, William was one of the stars of the men’s team.

But in 2018, William declared that he was, in fact, Lia and, in May 2019, began taking hormones to suppress testosterone. Thomas has not yet “fully transitioned”, and still has male genitalia. However, last year Thomas was allowed to switch to Penn’s female swim team and has since competed as a woman. Thomas recently told Sports Illustrated,“I am a woman, just like everybody else on the team”, adding: “There is no such thing as half-support, either you back me fully as a woman or you don’t.”

Now, there are some in the swimming community who do “back” her. Erica Sullivan, a biological woman, represented the US in the Tokyo Olympics and finished third behind Thomas. Before the race, she wrote in support of Thomas, claiming that sportswomen have a lot more to worry about than trans women competitors — such as sexual abuse and harassment, unequal pay, and a lack of women in leadership roles.

By and large, however, Thomas’s competitors and their parents aren’t willing to ignore the biological repercussions of that victory. Reka Gyorgy, a fellow swimmer who finished 17th in the qualifying heats, just one spot away from the final race, has written a letter to the NCAA stating that Thomas’s win “was not a specific athlete’s fault. It is the result of the NCAA and their lack of interest in protecting their athletes.”

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A fellow Penn female swimmer complained that Lia walks around the women’s locker room exposed, making teammates feel uncomfortable. “It’s definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,” she explained. Meanwhile, parents complain that the team is divided and “everything has fallen apart.” Such is the outrage that Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has been forced to wade in; this week, he signed a proclamation declaring the “rightful winner” of the race to be Emma Weyant, who came in second.

I have no prejudice against men who wish to identify as women. Nobody chooses to undergo surgery or take body-altering medicine on a whim. The transgender community deserves our support in the face of any and all abuse. None of this, however, means that biological women should be forced to accept the participation of trans women in their sports competitions. As law professor and former athlete Doriane Coleman has explained: “Compared to females, males have greater lean body mass (more skeletal muscle and less fat), larger hearts (both in absolute terms and scaled to lean body mass), higher cardiac outputs, larger hemoglobin mass, larger VO2 max (i.e. a person’s ability to take in oxygen), greater glycogen utilisation, and higher anaerobic capacity.”

The same applies to trans women who have gone through male puberty, regardless of any hormones they are taking, as many developments from puberty are permanent. As a report on male-bodied athletes by the International Women’s Forum makes clear, there are more than 3,000 genes that contribute to muscle differences between human males and females. “Genetic differences cannot be eliminated by reducing testosterone, and these differences may create different muscle responses to training between even those men and women who have the same concentrations of testosterone.”

This isn’t some fringe view: even the New Yorker agrees, noting that “males who have gone through puberty have, on average, more cardiovascular capacity, greater muscle mass, higher tendon mechanical strength, and denser bones… In many sports involving timed races, men are roughly 10-12% faster than women.” Lia Thomas proves this point, winning the NCAA 500-yard comfortably with a time of 4 minutes and 33.24 seconds. Though finishing at 65th overall when competing in the men’s 500-yard freestyle, Lia leapt to finishing first when competing against women.

The encroachment of male-born athletes into the female arena is not new: various controversies over female athletes deemed too masculine have played out over the past century. During the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for instance, officials forced American runner Helen Stephens to undergo a humiliating genital examination after she was accused of being a man. And well into the Sixties, female athletes were forced to participate in “nude parades” and undergo chromosome tests. Such measures undoubtedly degraded the very women they were intended to protect; yet as the case of Lia Thomas demonstrates, the sporting world is yet to conjure up a reasonable solution to the transgender question.

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In January, the NCAA announced a “sport-by-sport approach to transgender participation”, dropping its previous rule that all trans women could participate in women’s sports after just a year of testosterone suppression. Instead, it would now allow each individual sport to determine their own regulations. USA Women’s Swimming quickly responded with a new system that would have permitted trans women to participate only after three years of T-suppression, and added a panel examination to see if a trans woman had “physical developments” that might confer an advantage over biological women. But the NCAA struck down the new regulations, claiming that the late-stage rule change was “unfair” and had “potential detrimental impacts” on swimmers such as Thomas.

There was — surprise, surprise — little discussion about the “unfair” consequences the reversal would have on the other women competing. But should we be surprised? One sport after another now accepts trans competitors, from New Zealand’s weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who competed in the 2020 Olympics, to CeCe Telfer, who won an NCAA Division II track title in 2019. If this trend continues, it’s not inconceivable that biological women may find themselves squeezed out of sport altogether. What’s the point in a girl even trying to excel when, sooner or later, a trans woman could come along and deny them victory?

Yet there may be a solution: the Paralympics holds the key for how we can move forward. This isn’t to make any comparison between transgender people and those with physical disabilities — it’s merely to observe that it is possible to hold different sporting competitions for those with different innate physical characteristics.

At the heart of the Paralympics lies a fair and equitable approach to allowing athletes to compete against each other. All competitors are assessed by a panel of experts who examine both physical and technical limitations. The merits of the process are obvious: it stops able-bodied individuals from identifying as impaired and competing against those with limitations.

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Why not develop similar events for trans athletes, allowing individuals such as Lia Thomas to compete with appropriate peers? If Thomas meant it when she said that “I’ve always viewed myself as just a swimmer”, then this solution would enable her to do just that, while also accounting for the aspirations and rights of biological women. For trans men, too, it would also be an attractive option, given they currently stand little chance of sporting success.

The alternative — allowing Thomas to continue competing against women — is simply untenable. Thomas has already expressed interest in competing in the Paris Olympics in 2024 for the US women’s swim team. And without the kind of system I am proposing, she might well make it, shattering the hopes of  biological woman who deserves that place.

“I want to swim and compete as who I am,” Thomas said in a recent interview. It’s a sentiment I suspect is shared by many of the female swimmers she has competed against in recent years. Along with them, I look forward to cheering her on in the Trans Olympics.

Naturally, for this strategy to succeed, as many men as possible would need to march north and take up position in the pass. The wait for the Persians to arrive was a long and excruciating one. June came and went. Still the Great King did not come. July went by. Then, early in August, came the news that all Greece had been half dreading and half anticipating: the Persians were at hand.

Yet most Greeks, now that the moment of truth had finally arrived, put off marching north to Thermopylae. Only 4,000 troops from the Peloponnese ended up making the journey. The Spartans, the most formidable warriors in Greece, sent only 300. Why the delay? The question seems to have puzzled the Persians themselves. Two days it took them to clear the pass. Heroic though the defence of Thermopylae had been, and enduring though the fame of the 300 Spartans would prove to be, Xerxes knew that he had been lucky — for a larger Greek holding force might well have proved impossible to dislodge.

Accordingly, when deserters were brought into his presence, he demanded to know from them what the Greeks were up to. The answer left him even more bewildered than before. The Greeks, it turned out, were at Olympia, “celebrating athletic and equestrian competitions.” Not even a Persian invasion, it turned out, could stop the Olympic games.

Nor today has Covid stopped them. The show must go on, global pandemic or not. That the Games are opening today in a country that has very low vaccinations rates, and therefore — unsurprisingly — seems to have very little appetite for them, has been presented by the International Olympics Committee as a soaring triumph of the human spirit. “The best athletes of the world are looking forward with anticipation to make their Olympic dream finally come true.” So Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC, declared in ringing tones. The implication was clear – to abandon the games would be to surrender limply to Covid. “Tokyo 2020 will give humanity faith in the future.”

It will also, of course, give the IOC $3 billion of TV revenue. The modern-day Olympic movement, although founded as a monument to amateurism, has long since mutated into a monument to capitalism. Recently, under the leadership of Bach, it has become ever more of a business. Gassy slogans about the human spirit cannot disguise what really lies behind the IOC’s insistence that the Games go ahead: profit. The Japanese Government, backed into a corner by the finest international contract lawyers that money can buy, has found it impossible to break free. The stadia may be empty, the locals resentful, the risks to public health immense; but at least, on the plus side, the IOC won’t see their insurance premiums rocket.

In antiquity, too, the Games were perfectly capable of inspiring humbug. Herodotus, in his account of the aftermath of Thermopylae, portrayed Xerxes and his advisors marvelling at the revelation that athletes in the Olympic games competed only for wreaths made of olive leaves. “What sort of men are we fighting against,” one Persian grandee is reported to have exclaimed, “that they contend with one another, not for financial reward, but for the honour of being the best?”

This – although it would certainly have made Herodotus’ listeners feel good about themselves — did not tell the entire truth. The Greeks had no word for amateur. Just as gold medal winners today can look forward to lucrative sponsorship deals, so were victors in the ancient Olympics likely to be royally treated by their fellow citizens. In Athens, they were given free meals for life, the best seats in the theatre, a lump sum of cash. In Sparta, they were granted the greatest reward that any citizen could hope for: the chance to die in battle in the place of honour, next to the king.

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At Thermopylae, 300 had fallen in battle beside their king. Herodotus, by situating the Persians’ comments on the Olympics in the immediate aftermath of the battle, served to endow the Spartan war dead with an authentically Olympic glow of heroism. The athletes at Olympia and the hoplites at the Hot Gates had both of them paid due honour to the gods. Nothing was more important. This was why neither Herodotus nor anyone else ever blamed the Greeks for their failure to send all their reserves to Thermopylae. The Games were not simply games. They were a festival as holy as any event staged anywhere in Greece. It would have been unthinkable to abandon them. Terrible though the forces at the back of the Great King were, they were not so terrible as the wrath of the king of the gods.

“There are those who say,” observed Pausanias, a travel writer who visited Olympia some six centuries after the Persian invasion of Greece, “that Zeus wrestled there with Cronos, his father, for the throne of heaven.” This was to cast the games as a celebration of the entirety of Zeus’s reign: for it was only by toppling Cronos that he had ascended to the rule of Olympus. Paying honour to the king of the gods was not some incidental detail of the festival — it was the entire reason for the festival’s existence. Some fifty years after the battle of Thermopylae, the sculptor Phidias was commissioned to fashion a statue of the god for his temple at Olympia; and so potent did it prove to be, so imperious, so sublime that it came to be enshrined as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Even before its completion, however, there was no forgetting whose festival Olympia was. Zeus loomed as an intimidating presence throughout it. Before the games, standing beside a statue of the god, athletes would swear an oath over a dismembered boar not to cheat. Midway through the games came the blood-drenched centrepiece of the festival: the sacrifice to Zeus of a hundred oxen. At the end of the games, the winners were presented with their wreaths in Zeus’s very temple, before Phidias’ statue. A wreath was also placed on the head of the god himself. “Zeus, thunder-blaster,” wrote the poet Bacchylides in praise of one victorious athlete, “on the banks of the silver-flowing Alpheios you answered his prayers, you granted him your gift: eternal fame.” So might poets have written in praise of every athlete who ever won at Olympia.

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How tame and insipid, by comparison, will be the fame won by athletes in this year’s Olympics. Isolated from the miseries and the traumas of the world beyond their bubble, they cannot hope to embody, as the victors at Olympia did, the mingled brilliance and darkness that, in the opinion of the Greeks, constituted the quality of human existence. Some said that the games had originated, not with Zeus wrestling his father to the grounds, but with the victory in a chariot race of Pelops, grandfather of the king who married Helen of Troy; others that they dated back to 776 BC, when a butcher named Koroibos had been the very first to win an Olympic crown. The Greeks were perfectly capable of believing two contradictory stories at once.

The age of heroes, they believed, had ended amid the carnage of the Trojan War, and would never return; and yet, at Olympia, it was possible for men still to be hailed as heroes. What we mean by the word is but a pallid shadow of what it meant to the Greeks. Heroes stood as close to the divine as it was possible for mortals to stand; and their feats were duly gargantuan, prodigious, terrible. A famous wrestler, it was said, consumed a daily ration of twenty pounds of meat, twenty pounds of bread, and two gallons of wine. A boxer dealt with retirement by hurling himself into a fire. Another boxer, driven mad after disqualification, killed sixty children by pulling down a school, then hid himself in a box, and was found, when the outraged parents smashed it open, to have vanished from the face of the earth. “He is the last of the heroes.” So the oracle at Delphi pronounced. “Offer him sacrifice. He has ceased to be mortal.”

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The making of the Three Lions

By Dan Jackson

Covid-wracked though the world may be, we should count our blessings, nevertheless: for we do not face plagues or wars on the scale of those that provided a near constant backdrop to the ancient Olympics. The Games were not a distraction for the Greeks, still less a vehicle for making money, but a mirror held up to everything that they believed was most brilliant about being human. Alien as they were, terrifyingly so, it is hard for us, living as we do amid the comforts of the 21^st century, to regret them; but it is hard as well, perhaps, when we compare them to the modern Games, not to feel that something, just something, has been lost.

That’s the level that Laurel Hubbard (a mediocre male weightlifter from New Zealand who now identifies as a woman) was required to maintain for a minimum of 12 months in order to compete at this year’s Olympics against women. That’s also the level that South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya (who won gold in the women’s 800 metres in 2012 and 2016) refused to medicate herself down to. Consequently, Semenya is banned from defending her title in Tokyo. (Although eligible for the 5,000 metres, she did not qualify.)

For over a decade, Semenya has been both a celebrated athlete and the object of harsh, probing curiosity. In 2008, when Semenya was the world champion in the 800 metres, the journalist Ariel Levy visited Semenya’s former club in the devastatingly poor Limpopo province. Here, Levy met a small girl who informed her: “I will be the world champion. I want to participate in athletics and have a scholarship. Caster is making me proud. She won. She put our club on the map.”

But even before Semenya had made a name beyond her birthplace, it was being asked whether it was right for her to compete at all, never mind win. There were murmurs that Semenya — tall, narrow-hipped, flat-chested, deep-voiced and powerful as she was — must have an intersex condition. Bluntly, people wondered: was she female at all? Semenya’s former coach told Levy that the young runner was routinely summoned to the toilets so she could prove to her rivals that she had the right genitals for her race.

If Semenya was able to accept such intrusions philosophically at first, over time they became more and more profound, until eventually she found herself in front of the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2019, fighting against the requirement to suppress her natural testosterone levels. (The 5 nmol/L ceiling is still over twice the normal level for women.) CAS ultimately upheld the limit: the judgment it issued is lengthy, technical and heartbreaking.

Heartbreaking, because what is clear throughout Semenya’s testimony is that she has never doubted that she’s a woman. The public scrutiny of her sex, she said, had been “atrocious and humiliating” — and discriminatory too, since she argued that no comparable questions would be asked of a male athlete. The medication she took to reduce her testosterone made her ill, and any drop in her performance should be put down to that rather than seen as confirmation that she had an unfair hormonal advantage. It felt, she said, like a “punishment” for her body.

Sport is nothing without fairness. Every race, every match, every competition is a quest to find — and to reward — the exceptional within a given discipline. It’s true that without diligent training, even the most physically gifted will never make it within sight of the podium; but it’s also true that without those physical gifts, no amount of graft will turn you into an athlete. Beyond issues of basic safety, the baseline logic of every rule in sport is to exclude external influences that might obscure the quest for excellence.

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The Royal Academy's woman problem

By Sarah Ditum

That’s why doping is banned. It’s why running shoes and swimming costumes (and, in the Paralympics, prosthetics) are exhaustingly debated: at what point does “more efficient” shade into “cheating”? It’s why there are separate male and female competitions: the inarguable advantages produced by a male puberty in terms of height, strength and speed mean that in a mixed competition, outstanding women would always be overshadowed by men. And it’s why the Semenya question is so painful.

Clearly, her treatment has been unfair, and worse than unfair. There’s a grotesque, prying quality to reading the CAS judgment as it itemises her body, the contents of her blood, the nature of her chromosomes. But those chromosomes are 46XY — that is, male. Should her female competitors accept that as fair? As hard as they push their bodies, and as much as those bodies have to give, there are things that the XX will never be able to achieve.

It’s important to note that even Semenya’s best performances have never approached the speeds that men achieve. She doesn’t even hold a world record. But she did come close to breaking the women’s 800 metre time, which was set in the doping heyday of the Eighties. In other words, Semenya is suspiciously fast for a woman, but not fast enough to be exceptional as a man. She’s stranded in a hinterland of sex that makes her talent seem either excessive or inadequate. Extraordinary as she is, there’s no way for her to win.

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Can science ever debate trans issues?

By Jesse Singal

Semenya is the most prominent athlete caught in this hormonal bind, but not the only one. In 2014, Indian sprinter Dutee Chand was barred from competition over her elevated testosterone (she successfully appealed the decision); last week, Namibian sprinters Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi were both disqualified from the 400m in Tokyo for the same reason. Ugandan runner Annet Negesa had surgery to “fix” her intersex condition: her performances never recovered. For any athlete in this situation, the experience is intrusive, cruel and devastating. Some will have no idea that there’s anything unusual about their body until it becomes a matter of public dispute.

Proponents of trans women’s inclusion in female sports will often point to such examples as evidence of the egregious effects of gatekeeping sex. See, they say — by trying to keep males out, you only harm women. It’s even argued that the suspicion of Semenya is a form of racism, since her masculine appearance defies white beauty standards (although it’s clearly not Semenya’s race that makes her, in Levy’s description, “breathtakingly butch”). None of which has any relevance to Laurel Hubbard, who is unambiguously male and undeniably white.

There’s a terrible injustice in Hubbard being able to compete at Tokyo while Semenya cannot. The extent of testosterone’s effect on Semenya’s body is debatable; the extent of its effect on Hubbard, who has been through a regular male puberty, is not. And reducing the circulating testosterone in a male body can make an individual slow in comparison to a man, but it doesn’t make them female: the advantages of sex remain long after transition. Hubbard will never be forced through the cruel exposures inflicted on Semenya, because Hubbard’s sex is not in doubt.

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The inconvenient truth about transwomen

By Debbie Hayton

Despite trans activist efforts to treat “intersex” and “trans” as indistinguishable issues, they are simply not the same. One of Semenya’s objections to enforced testosterone regulation was that it was an attempt “to convert the DSD [difference of sex development] Regulations into a shadow transgender rule”. The effects of male adolescence being what they are, “transgender” can be read as “transwomen” here: trans men present no challenge whatsoever to the integrity of men’s sport. In other words, Semenya believed that a rule targeting intersex women was actually being shaped by consideration of male athletes who wished to enter female competition.

If that’s true, it’s typical. Repeatedly, intersex people’s lives are hijacked to prove that “sex is a spectrum”, so that undoubtedly male people can pretend the class of “female” is too hazy to exclude anyone from. But sex is not a spectrum. Every difference of sex development is an atypical presentation of either the male or female body — there is no “in-between”. Every person with a DSD deserves considerably better than to be recruited as a human shield for the infiltration of femaleness. People with DSDs have long campaigned against compulsory treatments; trans activists argue that without surgery and hormones, trans people will die.

In sport, sex should be simple: the case for separate male and female competition is so stark that only a blindness to women’s interests could lead anyone to neglect it. But in sport, sex is inevitably complicated: the very pertinence of sex to performance means that women with intersex conditions are liable to come under question, and every case will have its own subtleties. What shouldn’t be difficult is this: whatever “being a woman” means, there’s more to it than a deficiency of testosterone, and treating a woman like Semenya decently cannot require dissolving the notion of “women” altogether.