It was, admittedly, a devilishly tough choice. As the world championships of track and field were getting underway this August, the governing body of athletics asked South Africa’s top administrators for the sport to consider withdrawing Caster Semenya.

This was an option that might have spared the runner some of the subsequent trauma of having her gender picked over so publicly after she won the 800 metres.

The South African officials’ response was emphatic: Not over our dead bodies. But disturbingly, they now also say that they did not tell Semenya about their decision.

“We felt that that was not necessary,” Attlee Maponyane, vice president of Athletics South Africa said.

The decision to field Semenya without telling her about the governing body’s concerns is one of several questionable calls, even outright bureaucratic botches, in this horrific case, where the most intimate details about the young woman’s gender have made headlines worldwide.

Why, for instance, was the International Association of Athletics Federations caught so off guard when doubts about Semenya had swirled in South Africa for months, even years? After the 18-year-old won the 800 gold in Berlin on August 19, IAAF general secretary Pierre Weiss said Semenya had only recently come to their attention – when she clocked 1:56.72 on July 31, then the fastest time by a woman this year.

“She was unknown three weeks ago,” Weiss said. “Nobody could anticipate this one. Sorry. We are fast but we are not a lion.”

And yet, in March, the IAAF’s own website asked this question – “Semenya new teen 800m sensation?” – after she shaved more than three seconds off her previous best to break Zola Budd’s 25-year-old South African junior record. Semenya’s time of 2:00.58 in Germiston, South Africa, made her the world’s top junior of 2009. In the previous five years, again according to the IAAF’s site, only five juniors ran faster.

Yet alarm bells only rang at the IAAF following her blistering run in July and because a South African blogger, a week before that, posted this comment: “Caster Semenya is an interesting revelation. Interesting because the 18-year-old was born as a hermaphrodite and, through a series of tests, has been classified as female.”

Emails started flying, with the IAAF asking Athletics South Africa for test results or, failing that, for gender tests on Semenya. But by then, time was running short. The world championships were just two weeks away. Whether the IAAF and ASA could and should have cleared up the questions about Semenya’s gender far earlier by being more alert remains one of the many unanswered doubts.

South Africa won no medals at the last two worlds in 2007 and 2005. In Berlin, Semenya was considered one of nation’s best hopes for breaking that losing streak – as long as she could run and be shielded from the rumours that quickly started circulating among the press corps gathered for the championships.

In mid-August, IAAF medical experts Gabriel Dolle and Juan Manuel Alonso met at Berlin’s Intercontinental Hotel with Maponyane, who headed South Africa’s delegation at the worlds, and with ASA’s president, Leonard Chuene.

“They gave us two options. The first one was to withdraw her, the second one was to allow her to compete while the IAAF’s process of gender verification would continue,” said Maponyane. “We took the second option.”

He and Chuene give several reasons why they did not discuss the possibility of withdrawing with Semenya.

Chuene said: “She was just going to run, I can’t just say (withdraw) and kill her spirit. I was not going to do that … You’re psychologically destroying her before the race.

“How do we withdraw her, on what basis?” he added. “You going to say to her ‘You’re are not a girl?’”

At 18, the two men also apparently figured, Semenya was too young for such a discussion – even though South Africans can marry, vote and enrol in the military at that age.

“At 18 in our country, you are still a child,” said Maponyane.

He also suggested that they were worried about fallout back home if Semenya did not run.

“It was a very difficult thing. If you withdraw, what do you say to the country?” he asked. “We used the taxpayers’ money.”

So Semenya ran – exposing her to the media storm that erupted when the IAAF announced just hours before her 800m triumph that it was investigating whether she met the requirements to compete as a woman.

Given the option, would Semenya have pulled out, figuring that at 18 she still had time to make her mark on world athletics once the gender questions were cleared up? Or would she have run anyway? After all, she’s proved remarkably composed throughout this ordeal – unlike IAAF critics in South Africa framing this as a case of racial discrimination.

Either way, surely, it should have been Semenya’s choice.

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