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Cape Town - The International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) insists it is not solely targeting South Africa's Caster Semenya with its new gender rules for classifying female athletes.
This comes after Semenya last week lost her court challenge against the IAAF over plans to force female athletes to regulate their testosterone levels.
The decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) means that female athletes with elevated testosterone will have to take suppressive treatment if they wish to compete as women in certain events.
Is Semenya refuses, she'll likely be forced to enter men's events. READ: Caster allowed to participate in men's events - IAAF
The IAAF on Tuesday answered several questions on its website regarding the female eligibility regulations.
One of the questions posed was "why are you targeting one athlete?"
The IAAF responded to the question: "Some commentators have suggested that the regulations were (and have always been) directed at an individual athlete. That is not true. The IAAF is bound by strict confidentiality and so simply cannot - and will not - disclose the number of other athletes affected, or the identities of those athletes.
"We have seen in a decade and more of research that approximately 7.1 in every 1000 elite female athletes in our sport are DSD (disorder of sexual differentiation) athletes with very high testosterone levels in the male range. The majority of those athletes compete in the restricted events covered by the regulations.
"This frequency of DSD individuals in the elite athlete population is around 140 times higher than you will find in the general female population, and their presence on the podium is much more frequent even than this. The CAS accepted that this demonstrates, in statistical terms, that they have a significant performance advantage."
Another question posed was why the IAAF focused so much on testosterone "rather than other genetic differences like leg length, height or arm span?"
The athletics governing body’s response was: "It is correct that elite sport celebrates and rewards genetic differences (height, wing span, fast twitch muscles, etc).
"The only genetic difference that elite sport does not celebrate is the genetic difference between men (with male chromosomes, XY) and women (with female chromosomes, XX). That is because XY chromosomes produce testes (rather than ovaries), which produce testosterone in the typical male range (rather than testosterone in the - much lower - typical female range), which is what produces men’s bigger and stronger bones and muscles and higher haemoglobin levels, which gives them a massive performance advantage over women.
"CAS accepted this, and therefore accepted that the main driver of the marked sex difference in sport performance (10-12% on average) is the physical advantages conferred by having testosterone levels in the male range (7.7 - 29.4 nmol/L in blood) rather than the normal female range (06 - 1.68 nmol/L)."
