Dora Ratjen

First stop is Dora Ratjen, she joined 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. She’s remarkable because of her deep voice and she refuse to share the shower with her fellow female athletes. Dorothy Tyler her competitor, saying  “I had competed against Dora and i knew she was a man. You could tell by the voice and the build.” Her true gender was revealed when doctor was summoned to test her. In 1938 Ratjen was barred from further competition.

Our second shocker is Stella Walsh. She was a Polish-American sprinter, she was the fastest woman in the world. She won medals one was gold in 1932 Olympics and silver in1936 for the 100m sprint. She set more than 100 national and world records and was inducted into Track and Field Hall of Fame. She entirely live her whole life as a woman and also have a short-lived marriage to an American man. In 1980 Walsh was killed by armed robbery at a shopping mall in Cleveland, Ohio. Walsh was identified as man after the postmortem revealed that she has male genitalia and was also found that she have both male and female chromosomes.

The third shocker is Sin Kim Dan, she broke the women’s records for 400m and 800m in 1961 and 62. Dan was the first  to run 400m in less than 52 seconds. In 1963, a man claimed that she was his son who disappeared during the war. In 1966, obligatory sex testing for international athletics was introduced and for whatever reason Dan did not compete after that.

Our fourth is Edinanci Silva, born with both male and female sex organs, shocking wasn’t it? The Brazilian judo player had surgery in the mid 90’s and choose to be a woman. It made her eligible to participate in the games. She competed in Atlanta 1996, in Sydney 2000 and in Athens in 2004. In Sydney, she beat the Aussie Natalie Jenkins who raised of Silva’s gender in a press conference and referring to her as “him”.

Fifth is the Press sisters Tamara and Irina who won five track and field Olympic gold medals for the Soviet Union. Their careers suddenly ended at the time when the gender verification was introduced. Critics believed that the Press were actually male, or perhaps hermaphrodites.

Sixth shocker is Heidi Krieger, she was a 16 year old when her coach put her on steroids and contraceptive pills. She gained weight, built muscle and started to develop body hair. By 1986, aged 20, she was European champion and an Olympic shotput gold medalist. In the mid-90s, Krieger underwent gender reassignment surgery and changed her name to Andreas.

The seventh is Eda Klobukowka, was the first Olympic athlete to fail a gender test. Having registered “one chromosome too many”, she failed an early form of the chromatin test in 1967 and was subsequently banned from competing in professional sports. Before she fail the tests she won the gold medal in the women’s 4×100 m relay and the bronze medal in the women’s 100 m sprint at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

Santhi Soundarajan is our eighth shocker she’s a middle distance runner form India, won a medal at the 2006 Asia Games. Her medal was stripped when she failed a verification test.

Mary Edith Louise Weston is the ninth shocker. Best shotputter from 1924 to 1930 and the best javelin thrower in1927. She still holds Great Britain’s shot put record. Mary became Mark Weston in the mid 1930’s.

Our tenth and last shocker is Iolanda Balas, during the 1960’s mandatory gender testing was implemented Balas refused to compete in the Olympic Games. She went to the Budapest games – but only as a spectator, wearing an Ace bandage. According to Rumanian track officials, she was suspiciously suffering from a “calcified right tendon,” and was said to never be able to compete again.