Tuesday 30 March 2021 5:30pm to 6:30pm
Online webinar
About
The Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences is delighted to announce that the 2021 Baron de Lancey Lecture will take place online at 17:30 on Tuesday 30th March 2021.
Speaker: Dr Silvia Camporesi, King’s College London
How do we ensure a level playing field in sport given natural variations in human biology? When athletes’ biological levels differ from the norm set by their federation for a given sport, what is to be done? For example, is it fair to force female athletes to take testosterone-lowering drugs to be eligible to compete? In 2018, the International Association for Athletic Federations enacted regulations that prevent female athletes with naturally high levels of testosterone from competing in some athletics events. The validity of these regulations was challenged by South African Olympian Caster Semenya. In 2019, the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld the IAAF’s rules. Athletes like Semenya will now need to take testosterone lowering medication to compete. The decision was highly controversial.
Ordinarily, hormone-suppressing drugs feature on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s List of Prohibited Substances. Yet mechanisms exist to grant a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) on a case-by-case basis. The use of drugs is permitted via the TUE as an exception to what would be considered “doping”. The TUE authorizes athletes to treat medical conditions with prohibited medications, provided the drugs do not confer an unfair advantage. Should a natural trait that does not pose a medical problem be considered a medical condition? Dr Silvia Camporesi will explore these and related questions about the law and ethics of regulating and determining fairness in sport.
About the Speaker:
Dr Silvia Camporesi is a tenured Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King's College London, where she is the Director of the MSc in Bioethics & Society. In her research, Silvia merges her personal interest in track and field (she is a former middle-distance runner) with her professional interests in ethics and sport. Silvia has worked on the eligibility of female athletes with hyperandrogenism to compete in the female category since 2009, and was appointed to the World Anti-Doping Agency's Ethics Advisory Group in January 2021.
You can read more about Silvia’s research at: https://silviacamporesiresearch.org/
The lecture will begin promptly at 5:30 pm on Tuesday 30 March 2021. Please join the stream in good time as we expect that the event will be well-attended. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A.
Tickets are free, but required. Please book via the registration page.
This event is kindly sponsored by the Ver Heyden de Lancey Fund.