NOT A FAN OF COE-OPERATIONS
From day one in the month of March, I have marched on without interruption. Good training has been had and this has been without a doubt the best period of solid running and the best I have felt since the beginning of last Autumn. That said, I'm under no illusions of expecting too much when I put myself back on a racing line at Liver Hill next Tuesday night. But I need a race and I'm ready for a race. Time to get a few under the belt and see where I'm really at.
Last weekend camping overnight at Silverdale, the Saturday night sunset was just about the most incredible I have ever seen. Sights like this are probably ten-a-penny to the locals of Morecambe Bay, but it stopped me in my tracks heading back along the coastline of sands and rock having nipped out for a cheeky three miler. This - despite telling myself all day I was long overdue a rest day from running - but now so glad I defied my own orders. For ten minutes or so as oranges bled in to pinks, reflecting off the partially drained estuary of an outward tide, the colours, the light... it was a spectacle I have never quite seen the intensity and beauty of before. At first I cursed not having my phone with me to snap some images, but then considered it to be more liberating without and that my obligation was to soak up the moment for everything that it was and capture the memory as strongly as possible.
It's time I got on to the subject of my page heading though and so from the wonderous beauty of our star dropping off the horizon to the ugly spectacle that is the treatment of South African track runner Caster Semenya by the International Association of Athletics Federations. Ok, so I said I was done ranting for a while. But I genuinely do not consider this as some self-opinionated rant one bit. Yes I feel strongly about the matter, but yes I am absolutely convinced I am right about it too!
Caster Semenya has dealt with the indignity of proving her biological femininity in a most dignified manner, when in fact you could easily excuse the lass of a good old rant herself at the powers that be. But still, years later, proving you are a woman is not enough to be a woman it would seem in the eyes of the IAAF and some bitter individuals who back up the organisation's stance.
The disgraceful campaign to sexually disqualify an Olympic and World champion rolls on, seemingly until the overlords of athletics legislation finally force through their own aberrant agenda. If this sounds like the familiar stubborn trait of a UK Conservative government, then it can be no coincidence that sat in the big chief's presidential chair at the IAAF right now is former Tory MP, now Tory peer in the House of Lords, Sebastian Coe.
The massive irony is that Coe and the IAAF want to medically intervene with Semenya's body chemistry and similarly developed female athletes who are naturally higher in testosterone levels. Through Coe's goggles, this would create 'a level playing field' with other female athletes.
So let's get this right then. The world governing body revolts at the use of drugs in athletics. If performance enhancing drugs are banned, how can they paradoxically condone and lobby for performance restricting substances? That's one big contradictory policy right there. So drugs in sport? Yes or no, Coe and Co? Surely any performance altering medicinals have no place in athletics. What a bunch of frigging hypocrites.
Caster Semenya is currently fighting the IAAF's policy through the necessary legal channels and it goes without saying I hope with a passion that she wins emphatically.
To me, Coe has always come across as quite arrogant with traits of a narcissist and sociopath never far from the surface. Probably why his contemporary track rival Steve Ovett wasn't that keen on him either. But more recently I recall Coe's smug demeanour and self-appraising soundbites when helping bring the Olympics to London in 2012. Yes he helped and one could say he was instrumental at times. But to me it felt like Coe had created this pedestal for himself upon which he did it all on his own and without anybody else. He brought the Olympics back to London and for this we should all laud the Lord.
In more recent waffle from Sebastian, the politician from within has been cunningly at work, deliberately fudging the Semenya situation with transsexual athletes again - a completely different kettle of fish - by saying only last week, "The reason we have gender classification is because if you didn't, then no women would ever win a medal or break another record in our sport". It's the timing of those comments, knowing full well he can say he's only referring to the transgender debate, but as Semenya responded, "Digging up old wounds". An attempt to try and rattle her cage whilst these legal proceedings are under way is what it looks like.
Coe has been there at the very top as a track athlete and should know better. Hard work and natural talent got him there. Semenya has done the same. To claim her naturally higher testosterone levels are a significant reason for that does the girl such an offensive disservice in my opinion. If they did reduce her testosterone levels, then by how much? How accurate could the medication be? Would it serve as an actual disadvantage?
If her testosterone levels are indeed advantageous, then lets remember it's a natural one.
There are advantageous genetic factors that aid the prominence and dominance of African distance runners, so do we medically induce them to take the edge off their game and give the white boys and girls a chance? No. And Mo Farah, do we contest his long list of European and British championship accolades because of his more favourable Somali genes? Of course not. That the overwhelming majority of top end sprinters are of Black African or Caribbean ethnicity, should we fiddle with the genetic and biological make-up of them too or should we have separate sprint contests for whites and Asians etc? Absolutely not and who would even go there? But then comparatively, that is what Caster is up against. Singled out and persecuted for genetic and biological credentials.
Sport is all about strengths and weaknesses and trying to play to your strengths to succeed. When we have a special league for short footballers so they have a more reasonable chance of winning a header, or leg length categories for long jumpers, or rugby for skinny people, then lock me up and throw away the key. 
That Caster Semenya has reached the top of her sport is part of the issue here too. A punishment for hard work and dedication. If she wasn't anywhere near the medals then would this even be a talking point? Somebody who hasn't got in to the medals is British middle distance runner Lynsey Sharp. If her immediate post-race comments straight after the Olympic 800m final in 2016 weren't bad enough, she's still harping on about what she sees as an unfairness. Even if her own contorted opinion on the matter was heeded and Caster was made to take a form of performance suppression, mouthpiece Sharp would still not have made the podium at any major championships.
Let's also remember that 28 year old Semenya has yet to run a world record at either middle distance that she races so it's not as if her brilliance is so blatantly off the scale in the history books. She's talented, she works really hard and she has carried on doing that in the face of all this mud thrown at her over the years.
There could be a case that this all runs a bit deeper than these surface tensions about testosterone and deeper than even her legal team dare mention. Homophobia. Caster happens to be in a same sex marriage which she is rightfully proud and transparent about. But perhaps this fans the flames of scepticism even more for the strictly politically right heterosexual man's men and the likes who are trying to bring her down. To a man with very Conservative views such as Sebastian Coe for example, can we know for sure that he is entirely tolerant of homosexuality? We only have politically correct trite to the contrary which he has doubtless made a point of going on record about to cover his tracks.
However I look at it, all I can see is underlying discrimination of some sort or another. Sebastian Coe is at the very front of this persecution. It could be just because she wins medals, it could be sexuality, it could be racial, it could be more than all that and then all of those things put together, snowballed in to a storm of irritation within the IAAF establishment's corridors of deeply bigoted and hypocritical ideologies. Whatever is going on here, it's just not right.
If I had the highly unlikely and rather unfortunate opportunity to meet 'Lord' Coe, I would probably find myself so incensed by his presence that I would spit at the man's feet. The only time I have done that before (yes, I actually have) was at the feet of a retired police officer called Alan Mackay. Mackay, a Scot residing in the Chorley area of Lancashire, made highly offensive comments to me about a person in a wheelchair who was passing by the pool table in a pub many years ago. Mackay inferred there was no place for a wheelchair in that area and that it put him off his shot. It pains me to print what that pathetic old bigot actually said that night, but why should I cover for him? There was a bit more to it but, ''How can I get to see my shot properly with that f**king spastic in here...'' was the unforgivable jist of it. Mackay, Sebastian Coe and the IAAF... they are all stirring in the same sick and twisted pot. I have nothing but contempt for the lot of them.