Gender testing in sports: patching tires without flats

T he world cycling association UCI has postponed the decision on whether GPS tracking will become mandatory. Instead, officials have decided to introduce a gender test that female cyclists must undergo before the Olympics.

Two decisions, one difference: There is a need for GPS tracking, which has been known at least since the tragic deaths of the Swiss Muriel Furrer in 2024 and her colleague Gino Mäder in 2023. Both had fallen, and rescue came too late for both because they could not be located.

There is no need for the other issue on which the UCI believes it absolutely has to act, the genetic test that is supposed to be used to determine the “correct” gender of female athletes. Because there has never been a case in cycling that is hypothetically constructed like this: male fraudsters in women's clothing take successes away from “real” women. What there were rarely were tragic cases of people who were socially forced into one gender. There were more frequent cases of false and defamatory accusations.

The tragedies surrounding Muriel Furrer and Gino Mäder do not seem to be important or present to UCI officials if they want to appear in public as assertive doers. They can score points more easily when it comes to forcing female athletes to undergo compulsory tests. Just because they want to compete in a sport that already seems to people like the UCI officials to be a poor pastime: women's cycling.

A sport that the gentlemen have banned several times over the past 150 years and that they can't get out of the habit of bullying. It was not without reason that the American women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony praised the bicycle as early as 1900: "I think it has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world." There are still countries that ban or make it difficult for women to cycle in public: Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen and Sudan.

To this day, opening up public spaces with this wonderful vehicle is a great political issue. And to this day there are forces that want to make this more difficult for women.

That in turn reveals a lot about the World Cycling Association. For example, that the UCI is far from promoting and providing material equality for women's cycling, for example in terms of bonuses and salaries.

What does this have to do with the pro-tracking decision that everyone expected and then postponed? Not that little at all. Because it's not as if the barely limited use of GPS tracking, favored by large parts of the UCI, would be unproblematic. The professional union, CPA, Cyclistes Professionnels Associés, in which men and women are organized, does not stand for a head-on rejection of this technology.

Rather, the CPA wants to ensure that there can be no “transparent athletes” whose data is used without their consent. She is concerned with using technology to improve people's safety and is against capitalizing on body data.

It's the same on the bike as it is in real life: you can never hope for wise decisions from gray men. Even organizations that sound as harmless as a cycling association urgently need to be democratized.