Sharp got here sixth within the girls’s 800m remaining behind three now-barred athletes with variations in sexual improvement (DSD).
She informed sports activities presenter Jacquie Beltrao the game has modified significantly from when she was competing.
“Sometimes I look back and think I could have had an Olympic medal, but I gave it my all that day and that was the rules at the time,” she stated.
“Obviously, I wish I was competing nowadays, but that was my time in the sport and that’s how it was.”
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Gold medallist Caster Semenya, with Lynsey Sharp and Melissa Bishop on the girls’s 800m remaining on the 2016 Rio Olympics. Pic: Reuters
The Rio girls’s 800m remaining noticed South Africa’s Caster Semenya take gold, with Burundi’s Francine Niyonsaba and Margaret Wambui successful silver and bronze respectively. All three would have been unable to compete at this time.
Semenya gained a complete of two Olympic gold medals earlier than World Athletics launched guidelines limiting her participation within the feminine class.
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Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba and Margaret Nyairera on the girls’s 800m remaining on the 2016 Rio Olympics. Pic: Reuters
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The ladies’s 800m remaining on the 2016 Rio Olympics. Pic: Reuters
In a significant coverage overhaul launched this 12 months, World Athletics now requires athletes competing within the feminine class on the elite degree of the game to take a gene take a look at.
The assessments determine the SRY gene, which is on the Y chromosome and triggers the event of male traits.
The assessments substitute earlier guidelines whereby athletes with DSD have been capable of compete so long as they artificially lowered their testosterone ranges.
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From March: Necessary intercourse testing launched for feminine athletes
Sharp says whereas she was competing, governing our bodies “didn’t really deal with the issue head on”, and he or she was usually portrayed as a “sore loser” over the difficulty.
Regardless of operating a Scottish report in that race, her private greatest, she described the expertise as a “really difficult time”.
“Sadly, it did kind of taint my experience in the sport and at the Olympics in Rio,” she stated.
Sharp added that regardless of the adjustments, it stays a “very contentious topic, not just in sport, but in society”.
Boxing has now additionally adopted a obligatory intercourse take a look at to determine the presence of a Y chromosome at this month’s world championships.
The controversial Olympic champion Imane Khelif, who gained Olympic welterweight gold in Paris 2024 within the feminine class, didn’t take it and couldn’t compete.
She has appealed to the Courtroom of Arbitration for Sport in opposition to having to take the take a look at.
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Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson on the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo. Pic: Reuters
Sharp’s feedback come as British athletics star and Olympic champion Keely Hodgkinson is tipped to win her first world title in Sunday’s girls’s 800m remaining on the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo.
She is coming back from a 12 months out after struggling two torn hamstrings.
