In the Name of Fairness

By Joe Hawthorne and Sheeba Joseph, produced by Out There Podcast

Released on November 18, 2021

Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

WILLOW BELDEN: Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

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(Out There theme music begins to play)

Today we’re telling a story about fairness and sports. Running, specifically. 

On the surface, running seems like a pretty fair competition. The winner of the race is the fastest person from point A to point B. And to move up in the ranks, you just have to be a better runner than everyone else. Right?

Turns out, it’s not so simple. “Fairness” is a surprisingly complicated concept. And rules that are meant to ensure fairness can actually end up keeping some of the best athletes from participating.

Joseph Hawthorne has the story.

(Out There theme music ends and spy music begins to play)

JOE HAWTHORNE: John Tarrant and his brother arrived at Doncaster early Easter Monday to case the joint. They drove slowly through the town’s red-brick streets, dodging puddles and onlookers. Victor pulled up and got out to casually scout for security. 

(car door opens and slams shut)

“Bad news,” said Vic. “They’re looking for you.”

This sounds like the scene from a spy movie. But it wasn’t a heist for money. John Tarrant was trying to steal a marathon.

(music fades out)

JOE: Let’s back up. John grew up in England during World War II. After the war, he took up running.   

BILL JONES: He had an innate power, physical power and strength.

JOE: That’s Bill Jones, John Tarrant’s biographer.

BILL: He had great stamina, and he could run endlessly across the hills, along the roads. And that was his time. That was where John could be John.

JOE: As Jones puts it, the act of running awoke something in John. He ran against his own clock, but dreamed about racing top runners, perhaps even making it to the Olympics.

(Olympic-style theme song begins)

So, as a first step, he tried to join the local running club…and he was rejected.

(music ends abruptly)

The reason John was rejected had nothing to do with his prowess as a runner. That was undeniable. Instead, it was because of something he had dabbled in years earlier.

John had briefly taken up boxing. He wasn’t very good, and he didn’t do it for long. But he did earn 17 pounds fighting at a local pub. Turns out, that little bit of money from boxing would haunt him for the rest of his life. 

(soft music begins)

In the 1950s, British racing associations had strict amateurism rules. Sports were supposed to be pure, and earning money at sports was seen as corrupting. It didn’t matter how little the prize was — if you’d ever earned a single penny from sports, you were out.  

BILL: And there was no forgiveness. There was no way he could earn the mercy of the establishment. 

So he stewed on that for years. And, I mean years. He wrote letter after letter after letter. 

JOE: John was rebuffed or ignored by every racing official he contacted, but he was desperate to compete. So he cooked up a radical scheme: if he couldn’t participate in races officially, he’d race unofficially. 

(music fades out)

He’d just jump right into marathons as they started, without being on the race roster.

The first race he identified was a marathon in Liverpool. He traveled there by train. See John couldn’t afford a car to drive, and he snuck into the changing room.

BILL: They were small fields in those days, only 50 or 60 runners, but the best runners in Britain, and some runners from Europe. And they wondered who he was, but he kept quiet.

JOE: And he walked quietly out to the track, right as the race was about to begin. When an official fired the starting gun...

(sound of gun firing and running footsteps)

John jumped up from the crowd and sprinted into the race.

BILL: And immediately the stewards tried to stop him. 

(sound of whistle blowing)

People with loud hailers were calling for this strange man in his black vest, in his old  battered shoes, to stop running. He was an illegal runner — to get out of the race! He was going to spoil the race. 

But they couldn't catch him. They couldn't keep up with him.

(sound of footsteps fades away)

JOE: He didn’t end up winning that day, but within 48 hours articles began to appear in the national press.

John was nicknamed the “Ghost Runner” because racing officials refused to record his existence. 

Over the course of the next few years, John crashed more and more races. By the late 1950s, he was coming in first and second on a regular basis.

Despite his successes, officials pretended he didn’t exist. Every time. If Tarrant finished third, for example, they moved the fourth-place runner up to third, the fifth-place runner up to fourth, and so on. After each competition, he was officially erased.

But as he continued to crash races each weekend, John got an unexpected lift from the BBC.

(sound of wind blowing and running footsteps)

DAVID (BBC REPORTER): Are you training as hard as this every day, John? 

JOHN TARRANT: Yes, every day, David.

DAVID: How many miles are you doing a week?

JOHN: 80 miles a week.

DAVID: And no prospect of competition at all?

JOHN: No prospect of official competition.

DAVID: How long...

JOE: In a rare recorded interview, the newscaster actually joins John on an afternoon run. I wish more TV anchors did this today!

DAVID: Well I must say, John, you’re the most genuine amateur I think I’ve ever met!

(footsteps and wind fade out)

JOE: The positive press encouraged John to go on the offensive.  

BILL: And I think fundamentally, he eventually, he wore the system down in a changing environment. It…he became an embarrassment. He became a situation where it was better to shut him up by allowing him to run, than by allowing him to continue to embarrass the authorities. 

JOE: Eventually the British racing authorities “found” a loophole to let John into domestic races. Tarrant happily shed his “Ghost Runner” persona and was racing up and down the country. 

But as it turned out, his victory at home did not translate to an overall victory for his career. 

(music begins to play)

He was now allowed to compete in the UK, but he was still banned from ANY international competitions. So at these events abroad, Tarrant was back to being the ghost runner — racing unofficially and never earning medals for his victories.  

It wasn’t easy, racing illegally.

When he went to South Africa for a 56-mile ultra marathon called the Comrades race, event officials did everything they could to scare him off. 

BILL: Well, the press was against him. Other runners were instructed not to speak to him. He was not allowed to take refreshments from the roadside tables, over a 56 mile run — therefore, in theory, he was going to have to run 56 miles without a drink. 

There was...letters were circulated by the South African athletics administrators, warning other athletes that merely by sharing the road with John Tarrant, they were themselves in breach of international athletics codes. So John had become a form of virus, you know, and to be in his presence was to be in the presence of something contagious to them.

(music stops)

JOE: And this is where we’re going to pause John’s story, and fast forward in time. 

In the 21st century, Tarrant’s ban is almost absurd. We don’t think it’s right to bar working class athletes from sports for just trying to earn an income. 

Exclusionary practices, though, have not gone away. And it turns out, the reasons WHY we exclude people today are shockingly similar to the reasons people like John Tarrant were excluded decades ago. 

ANNET NEGESA: Running was just like my life.

JOE: That’s Annet Negesa, a modern-day runner from Uganda. Annet specializes in the 800 meters, and she was recognized at an early age.  

ANNET: I was so tiny and slender. By that time I was so small, I was too tiny. And I was running with big people. They were much older and huger than me. I was a slender person. 

JOE: Despite her size, Annet grew into a formidable runner. As she grew, she outpaced any local competition. By 2012, Annet was being hailed as the country’s next great hope for the London Olympics. She spent every day training. But just as she was preparing for the Olympics, she was blindsided.

ANNET: I received a call from my manager, and told me, “You know what? You can't, you can't be allowed to go for that competition.”

(soft music begins)

JOE: Blood tests from the previous year showed that Annet had unusually high levels of testosterone. According to World Athletics authorities, these hormones could give her an unfair advantage in building muscle and endurance. It seemed that Annet would be disqualified.

But from her point of view, Annet was shocked. She hadn’t taken performance enhancing drugs or done anything that could explain her strange blood tests. She had no idea what was going on.  

ANNET: So I was waiting for the manager to explain to me really, because I was not understanding. Me, I was thinking that when I qualify that everything is done.

(music fades out)

JOE: Annet eventually learned that this high testosterone test was a naturally occurring phenomenon.

Testing revealed that Annet was intersex. “Intersex” is a term used to describe people whose anatomy doesn’t fit the traditional definitions of “male” or “female.” For example, this could include someone who was born with genitals that are somewhere in between what’s typical of men and women. Or someone might have physical features that look female on the outside, but have inner anatomy that’s typical of males. 

In Annet’s case, she had internal testes and testosterone levels that were much higher than usual for women. 

To give you some context, you probably know someone who is intersex. About 1.7% of the world’s population is born with intersex traits. That is about as common as having red hair. 

Sometimes a person can live their whole life without ever discovering they’re intersex. 

So you can imagine the shock and bewilderment Annet must have felt upon hearing this life-altering news.

(melancholy music begins)

Because of Annet’s high levels of testosterone, officials from the International Association of Athletics Federation said she wasn’t eligible to compete as a woman. 

When Annet heard the news, she was crushed. Running had been her passion, her life. And now, on the eve of going to the Olympics, she was being turned away. Simply because of who she was.

(music continues for a few notes and then fades out)

WILLOW: Hey, it’s Willow. We’ll hear the rest of the story in a moment. But first…

(sound of a package being opened)

This is the sound of me opening a package from a company called Tentree.

Tentree makes eco-friendly clothing, and for every item sold, they plant 10 trees. They’re also one of our sponsors for this episode.

(more rustling)

WILLOW: Oh my gosh, this is so soft. I might never want to take this off.

WILLOW: One of the things I ordered from Tentree is a hoodie.

WILLOW: Love the colors. They’re like these really beautiful earthy greens and greys. And it’s pretty...it’s casual but stylish at the same time.

WILLOW: Like I said, for every item you buy, Tentree plants TEN TREES. For 15% off your first order, go to tentree.com and enter the promo code OUTTHERE at checkout. That’s T-E-N-tree-dot-com, promo code OUTTHERE. 

And now, back to the story.

JOE: Sports are all about fairness; we like to think of these games as a true meritocracy.

Of course there’s no such thing as total fairness — people all have different heights, weights, and body structures. But officials are supposed to decide on rules that promote equity and health. For example, that’s why we have regulations on performance enhancing drugs. It’s why we often separate men’s and women’s sports. It’s why there are amateur leagues and professional leagues.

But where do we draw these lines? And who are the rules made for?

VICTORIA JACKSON: The history of modern sports governance is a history of unintended consequences.

JOE: That’s Victoria Jackson. She’s a sports historian at Arizona State University and a former professional runner. 

(soft music begins to play)

To her, there’s a throughline between the Ghost Runner and Annet Negasa. In both of their cases, she says, the governing bodies for their sport designed the rules in the image of their founders. Everyone who didn’t fit that image was excluded. 

In the case of the Ghost Runner, the governing bodies for sports were run by elites.

VICTORIA: So as white, elite Europeans, Americans, and Brits creating a sport, you know, mega-event for themselves, thinking that everyone else needs to live up to their principles — because they're moral, they're pure, they're just, they play sports the right way. And if you want to play with us, you need to live up to our principles.

(music slowly fades out)

JOE: Remember, this was during the Industrial Revolution, a period of radical change. Sports were one way elites could continue to signal their aristocratic class. Athletes that needed to be paid were considered “ungentlemanly” and were excluded.

Over the years, athletes have been separated or excluded for many reasons: race, nationality, sex. For decades, American football, baseball and hockey were segregated based on race. At the time, virtually all of the owners or commissioners of these leagues were white men.

In the 1904 Olympics, segregation was even more blatant. White organizers separated people from non-European countries into so-called Special or “Savage” Olympics.

Even when a marginalized group is included, there are often additional hoops to jump through. Women were allowed to start participating in the Olympics at the beginning of the 20th century, but they had to undergo “sex testing.”

VICTORIA: So there's this perception, which is never validated, that either individuals or the countries they compete for will get men to masquerade as women and try to win at women's events…pretending to be women, but they're really men. 

Because the assumption is that men are automatically athletically superior to women, and also that men will do whatever it takes to win, even if that means pretending to be a woman. 

So in the early period of sex testing, it was like a “line up and show your parts” parade, where medical doctors would, you know, line up the women competing in international competitions and have them show their parts. And the doctor would, you know, confirm that they were all women based on their external genitalia, and then they'd be cleared to compete.

And of course, it’s not both categories of competition. It’s only the women that have to prove they’re women. Men never have to prove they’re men, because, you know, they’re the default category. So of course you don’t have to prove that you’re a man; we just know you are. But if you’re a woman, you have to prove it. And you have to play by what our idea of what a woman is — not yours, not your culture’s, not your community’s. 

JOE: And that brings us to athletes like Annet. In 2012, the International Association of Athletics Federation, what is today called World Athletics, told Annet that her testosterone levels were too high to qualify as a woman. And there was no Olympic category for non-binary athletes, or those with differences of sex development.

(quiet piano music begins)

But Annet is not alone; there are other athletes just like her. 

VICTORIA: But again, bodies exist on spectrums in all sorts of ways, including hormones. So we have lots of women who have high testosterone for all different sorts of reasons: polyovariancystic syndrome is one reason why women have high testosterone, when women are pregnant they have more testosterone in their bodies... 

JOE: These are all naturally occurring phenomena, but they’re still considered unacceptable by governing bodies. 

(music fades out)

As far as we can tell, none of the officials who currently make the rules for international track and field publically identify as having high testosterone, or being intersex. 

To be clear: I’m not trying to vilify athletics officials. We reached out to World Athletics, the governing body of international track. Their stated mission is to ensure fair competition. Over email, the spokesperson explained that athletes with differences of sex development, like Annet, have an unfair advantage. They wrote — quote  — “Without these regulations World Athletics has no way to maintain the separation of male and female categories.” End quote.

Fairness is a worthy goal, but officials have to balance a difficult position. The challenge is that even if you make rules for the right reasons, the end result can still be problematic

VICTORIA: And just the layers and layers and layers of rules that have the perception of kind of clean, scientific, fair, objective rules, they carry a lot of baggage when it's up to humans to make decisions about what is fair, what is clean, what is in violation of the spirit of the sport. And so if the original stakeholders come from a certain class, racial, cultural, social, political, economic background, those founding structures have tentacles that carry into the present, but again, often kind of creating many different unintended results.

(soft guitar music begins)

JOE: Unintended results, like sidelining entire groups of people. People who are exceptional athletes, but don’t fit neatly into the narrow categories we’ve created. People who are too different from those making the rules.

Elite athletes stand apart from the crowd because they are different. Because they are above average. But when sports leagues are slow to adjust for changing times — when we get so hung up on rigid definitions of normalcy — some of the most promising athletes are excluded.

Jackson sees a silver lining, though, which is that people want to win. And not just personally — people want their teams to win. That can create a major incentive to start rethinking who’s allowed to compete.

VICTORIA: And winning is the greatest democratizing force in the history of modern sports, because in order to win you have to expand your talent pool.

JOE: Which means inviting in some of the very people that you might have been excluding.

(music fades out)

JOE: Sports may have democratic elements, but the reality is that the aftermath for these runners isn’t neat. 

John Tarrant became a champion marathoner within the UK, and he traveled to South Africa for several ultra-marathons. He was one of the few notable athletes to protest Apartheid in sports there. But John was never able to fulfill his dream of competing in the Olympics. And that wasn’t easy on him.

BILL: The realization that he couldn't run internationally really, really hurt him. 

JOE: Here’s Bill Jones again, the Ghost Runner biographer.

BILL: When I was researching this book, and I found all his correspondence, which his wife had kept. The thing that moved me the most was the letter from the International Amateur Athletics Federation, which was...which began, “Dear Tarrant.” It didn't even begin, “Dear Mr. Tarrant.” And it was informing him that he would never be allowed to run overseas or for Britain. 

And the letter had been opened and folded so many times — clearly shown to friends, clearly shown to runners, clearly shown to people who might help him — opened and closed, opened and closed. The corners of the folds had worn through and, and the sort of dirt of his fingers was visible along the crease marks. 

The indignity this...the, the humiliation, the frustration was, was, was palpable in this single letter. 

JOE: John Tarrant died at 43 from stomach cancer.

(music begins)

Annet Negesa has also had a hard go of it. She was one of the most promising athletes in Africa, but she’s also never made it to the Olympics.

World Athletics rules stated that if athletes underwent a physician-approved treatment to reduce their testosterone levels, they could be reinstated. Later in 2012, a gonadectomy was performed on Annet to remove her internal testes. This was meant to address the source of her high testosterone, although Annet later said she did not understand the extent of the surgery. Critically, though, the procedure was performed too late for her to compete in the 2012 Olympics. She never received the proper hormone treatment after the surgery, making it hard to recover as an athlete and as a patient.

Just a few years later, the World Medical Association put out a press release advising physicians not to carry out surgeries like the one Annet had, because the procedures are not medically required or even recommended for healthy individuals — they’re only intended so that athletes can compete in sports.

(music fades out)

The ordeal didn’t just ruin Annet’s running career; it derailed her life. Uganda has a disturbing history with non-traditional identities. There have been calls to murder people just for being gay. People were less than welcoming about Annet’s situation

ANNET:  No one can give you a job. Because now like differentiating you when you go to the office, they say is this a woman or man? Woman or man? Such things really discourages someone's mind. 

JOE: Annet eventually fled because she felt unsafe remaining in Uganda. She gained asylum in Germany in 2019. 

After keeping silent about her experiences for seven years, she began sharing her story, and she has started training again. Annet's hoping that her story will bring change and awareness to the rules, but she knows it's going to be an uphill battle.

PAYOSHNI: For the longest time, athletes with high testosterone were told that they were cheaters. 

JOE: That’s Dr. Payoshni Mitra, an Athletes’ Rights Activist for High T athletes like Annet.

PAYOSHNI: They were made to feel as if they were cheating, but they have never doped. This is high testosterone which is naturally occurring high testosterone. So there is nothing to hide about it, there is nothing to be ashamed about it. This is how they are born. 

JOE: As Dr. Mitra explains, a lot of athletes are ashamed about their exclusion, and afraid to reach out.

PAYOSHNI: This is such an issue where you don’t expect an athlete to believe that that athlete can be supported by someone. So athletes feel so vulnerable and so helpless. And they feel that, they don't, they really don't understand that there is another option, there could be someone who could help them somehow. 

So athletes generally don't reach out. Also the fact that they're often told by these Federations and Federation Officials that there's something wrong about them, there is a reason to hide, whatever it is. And athletes tend to believe in that and not reach out to people who might be of help. 

JOE: These aren’t happy endings. These are athletes making the best of what they have — trying to follow their dreams in a world where the rules, however well intentioned, have shut them out. Here’s sports historian Victoria Jackson again.

VICTORIA: You know these, these governing bodies are suspicious of the athletes, but the athletes have the right to be suspicious of the governing bodies as well. And it takes incredible courage for these runners to say “no” to these powerful institutions, when all they want to do is run as themselves and compete. We should be paying as much attention to the consequences of rules as the rules themselves. 

(soft music begins)

JOE: Dr. Mitra takes it one step further. To her, fair play, inclusivity and health are all intertwined. At a basic level, she says, a race is fair when everyone can take the same playing field.

PAYOSHNI: The way fairness is sort of defined today, and the way inclusion and fairness seem to be sort, you know, on opposite sides, is actually not true. Inclusion is fairness. 

WILLOW: That story was reported and produced by Joseph Hawthorne and Sheeba Joseph.

Joe is a producer for a new podcast from Campside Media, called Eclipsed. It’s a weekly narrative history podcast that re-investigates important events from the past that were overshadowed.

Sheeba is Out There's Audience Growth Director and she’s a freelance producer based in New York. She's currently working on another story about Annet Negesa. That story is a more in-depth look at Annet’s experience and her activism. It’s going to run on a podcast called “The Long Game,” which is a co-production of Foreign Policy and Doha Debates. The Long Game takes you around the world to meet athletes who are fighting for change, and it’s hosted by Olympic medalist Ibtihaj Muhammed. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you’d like to learn more about the Ghost Runner, check out the biography that Bill Jones wrote about him. It’s called Ghost Runner: The Tragedy of the Man They Couldn't Stop.

I have a link to all those items in the show notes, at outtherepodcast.com.

(music fades out)

Coming up next time on Out There, we’ll have a story about a woman named Melat Amha, who suffered from a mysterious illness — for YEARS.

MELAT AMHA: I went to the doctor. Many, many doctors. I was told that the heartburn was caused by stomach acid washing up into my esophagus. Ok, but why is it doing that? They didn’t know. They explained that the food sensitivities were likely caused by food particles escaping my gut and causing my immune system to freak out. Sure, but why are there suddenly holes in my intestine? Again, nothing.

WILLOW: And then Melat moved to a farm. And everything changed. Tune in on Dec. 2 to hear that story.

(cheerful music begins to play)

It’s time now for community classifieds. Today’s classified ad comes from Jesse McNeil. Jesse has a new book out called On the Hoof: Pacific to Atlantic, A 3,800-Mile Adventure. At times carpenter, commercial fisherman, dabbler in real estate...Jesse decided to buy an untrained horse, make himself into a horseman, and ride all the way across the United States. On the Hoof is about that adventure. Ask for it at your favorite bookseller or order from horseandriderbooks.com.

(music fades out)

Don’t forget that you can get a free Out There sticker, and be entered into a drawing for a chance to win an REI gift card, if you fill out our listener survey! Just click the link in the show notes or to go outtherepodcast.com. Thank you SO much.

(Out There theme music begins to play) 

If you’re new to Out There, check out the “Best of Out There” playlist. This is a collection of some of our favorite episodes of all time — and it’s a great introduction to the range of stories we do on the show. You can find “Best of Out There” on Spotify, and at our website outtherepodcast.com.

That’s it for this episode. Our advertising manager is Jessica Taylor. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Cara Schaefer is our print content coordinator. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold. 

We’ll see you in two weeks.

(theme music ends on a last whistling note)