Ed Warner: The Paralympics is heading for a transgender row in Paris

A row over the eligibility of Italian transgender athlete Valentina Petrillo looms over the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, showing why para sports must be independent from organisers the IPC.

It is increasingly difficult to find footage online of Raygun at Paris 2024. For a brief moment it seemed the Aussie breakdancer who launched a thousand memes would be one of the defining collective global memories of this summer’s Olympics, but the sinister hands of internet airbrushers will likely leave her a little-remembered footnote.

Instead, the French will always have Leon Marchand, Antoine Dupont and a glorious opening ceremony on the Seine. The rest of us will remember Simone Biles, Mondo Duplantis and a disastrous opening ceremony on the Seine. The controversy over the two gold medal winning boxers with differences in sex development (DSD) will likely stay long in all of our memories though.

A week from the opening of the Paralympics, the International Paralympic Committee has made an early pitch to create the enduring memory of its own Games. Inclusivity sits at the heart of everything the IPC stands for. 

It is little surprise then to see it allow a transgender woman to compete in the T12 female category in the sprints for visually impaired athletes. Unsurprising but wrong.

Fifty-year-old Italian Valentina Petrillo is ranked 10th and 6th in her 200m and 400m events this year having started to compete as a woman in 2020. She won two bronze medals at last year’s World Championships. 

Petrillo is a second off the 2024 world best times in both her events, so a medal hopeful rather than the favourite. It may be that a failure to make the podium next month — let alone win gold to match the two Olympic boxers — deflates the balloon of controversy about her participation.

I served for a decade as chair of the IPC’s sport technical committee for World Para Athletics. The STC spent inordinate amounts of time debating knotty issues of disability classification. 

These were especially vexed in athletes with visual impairment (just how much could they see?) and those with neurological conditions such as cerebral palsy where there exists a range of sport classes intended to ensure fair competition.

Believe me, this is elite sport and with it comes appeals from nations against the classification of rivals’ athletes, and sometimes even from athletes against competitors within their own country. Britain and Britons (as well as their parents) are as sharp-elbowed as any in such cases. 

A transgender issue never reached our inbox, but I’d like to think I would have fought against the IPC’s stance — and the WPA regs — had one arisen.

“An athlete shall be eligible to compete in women’s competition if they are recognised as female in law.” World Para Athletics regulations.

Both the IOC and IPC have effectively stated that an athlete’s gender on their passport is the defining factor in determining their eligibility to compete. The IPC’s President Andrew Parsons has gone further in recognising the confusion to say that his organisation is keen to be guided by the science. 

What science? Surely not the same science that World Athletics president Seb Coe cites as the reason for ruling transgender women out of female able-bodied athletics?

“The definition of who is eligible to compete in a female event or not is up to each international governing body.” IPC President Andrew Parsons in 2023. The IPC controls the governing body for para athletics.

“Science hopefully will be able to give us the answer.” Parsons earlier this month.

“Many believe there is insufficient evidence that trans-women do not retain advantage over biological women, and want more evidence that any physical advantages have been ameliorated before they are willing to consider an option for inclusion into the female category.” World Athletics president Seb Coe in 2023.

I can’t help thinking that a key factor in the cases of the two DSD boxers and Valentina Petrillo is that the IOC took direct responsibility for boxing at this Olympics and the IPC controls World Para Athletics rather than it being part of World Athletics. 

In both cases, attention paid to the cases is likely to have been too slight and come too late to prevent them blowing up. Also, the further a decision-maker is from those directly impacted by an eligibility decision, the less likely they are to be able to truly empathise with everyone involved.

The IPC is conducting a protracted process to unshackle those sports that it ‘owns’ and either set them up as independent international federations or transfer them to their able-bodied counterparts. 

I had hoped that World Athletics would step up and absorb para athletics, but it has always appeared to have very little interest in doing so — I suspect because of the financial burden it feels that this would place on very many of its impecunious member nations.

Instead both para athletics and para swimming are transitioning to independent status, located in future in Manchester rather than at the IPC’s HQ in Bonn. This process should be complete well before Los Angeles 2028. 

Lots of questions remain, in particular the commercial model and financial backing (whether from the UK government, the city of Manchester and/or the IPC) that will allow these two cornerstone sports at the Paralympics to thrive. I fear that both might find themselves going backwards in their early years of unsought independence.

The IPC’s rationale for untying these sports is that this will remove a conflict with its core purpose of owning the Paralympic Games. Other, smaller sports have griped about the perception of conflict down the years and have long pressed for the change that is now in train. 

They should cross fingers and hope that athletics and swimming are in rude health come 2028 so that there is no dip in their quality that might taint the perception of the whole Games.

The removal of individual sports from IPC control was approved in 2021. When I asked about the process for para athletics and swimming this week I was told “talks ongoing”.

At first I was chairy about the move to an independent existence for World Para Athletics, but the decision to allow Valentina Petrillo to run in the female category in Paris is sufficient in itself for me to wish the unshackling of WPA to happen as swiftly as possible. 

My plea then to whoever is chosen to lead the new federation is that they be brave enough to be ruled at all times by common sense rather than shelter behind appeals to science and empirical evidence that will always be open to dispute. Meantime, the heats of the T12 women’s 400m in Paris are on 2 September.

You can watch a trailer for 5 Nanomoli, a 2023 documentary about Valentina Petrillo, here.

Is the ECB building in obsolescence?

The cricketing summer has reached its pivot point. The August breather for The Hundred is over, so now Test match cricket can recommence alongside the resumption of the two principal county competitions, the white-ball T20 Blast and the red-ball Championship. Just as the nights draw in and morning dew lies increasingly damply on wickets.

The flaws in the current cricket calendar are clear for all to see. Opposing views on The Hundred are by now deeply entrenched. The auction of franchises in the competition is about to begin and will stretch through the winter. 

The more I reflect on this sale process and its ramifications, the more I wonder whether the England and Wales Cricket Board has (inadvertently/deliberately?) signed up to a significant diminution in its power to run domestic cricket.

Spool forward just a few years and it is easy to envisage the owners of franchises in The Hundred demanding full control of the tournament and with it a crucial month in the height of the summer. 

Couple that with counties one-by-one switching from member control to more conventional equity structures and you could have a situation akin to the Premier League and EFL in football which has left the FA in charge of the England team and the grassroots game, plus a cup competition with diminishing status as it drops down club owners’ priorities.

Right now, the ECB provides a financial lifeline to the counties which it tugs on to just about keep the game together. 

It believes The Hundred auction will transform counties’ finances. But what if in doing that it finds itself just managing England teams whose players are effectively controlled by the franchises, plus village green cricket? 

Perhaps that’s the outcome that its modelling has pointed the ECB towards all along.

Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com