World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said Tuesday that the track and field’s governing body has approved the introduction of cheek swabs and dry blood-spot tests for female athletes in order to maintain “the integrity of competition.”
The planned changes include reinstating a version of chromosome testing that was discontinued in the 1990s, requiring athletes who compete in the female category to submit to a cheek swab or dry blood-spot test for the presence of a gene that indicates whether the athlete has a “Y” chromosome present in males.
Coe told a news conference that athletes will have to take the test just once during their career.
“It’s important to do it because it maintains everything that we’ve been talking about, and particularly recently, about not just talking about the integrity of female women’s sport, but actually guaranteeing it,” Coe said after a two-day meeting of the World Athletics Council in Nanjing. “We feel this is a really important way of providing confidence and maintaining that absolute focus on the integrity of competition.”
It’s unclear whether the tests will be in place before the world championships in September. Coe said that the new regulations will be drafted and that a testing provider will be confirmed over the next few weeks.
Coe, the two-time Olympic champion who was unsuccessful last week in his bid to become IOC president, has been vocal about “protecting the female category” in track and field. He has said the International Olympic Committee needs to take a leadership role in the transgender debate instead of letting each individual sport decide their own regulations.
Those recommendations came only days after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order barring transgender athletes from competing in girls sports in the U.S. and pressured the Olympics to do the same. Los Angeles will host the 2028 Summer Games.
Asked whether World Athletics felt the policy would withstand legal challenges, Coe said he was confident after an exhaustive review.
“I would never have set off down this path in 2016-2017 to protect the female category in sport” without being “prepared to take the challenge head on,” Coe said.
He added: “We’ve been to the Court of Arbitration on our DSD (differences in sex development) regulations. They have been upheld, and they have again been upheld after appeal. So we will doggedly protect the female category, and we’ll do whatever is necessary to do it.”
Cash prizes for Olympic champions to increase
Coe said World Athletics was also committed to increasing prize money for Olympic champions. It awarded prize money at last year’s Paris Games for the first time, giving gold medallists $50,000 US each, and has promised that at the 2028 Los Angeles games there will be cash for silver and bronze too.
“That’s something that I’ve always believed: where possible, you make the financial security of the athlete one of your priorities,” Coe said, adding that total prize money over events in the next four-year cycle would total $51 million.
World Athletics said there would be no change to sanctions over Russia and Belarus, whose athletes remain banned from international competitions since 2022 following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
