The Race to be Myself

World champion runner Caster Semenya offers an empowering account of her extraordinary life and career, and her trailblazing battle to compete on her own terms.

Caster Semenya is one of the greatest athletes ever to run the 800 meters. Semenya went undefeated for almost four years, winning two Olympic gold medals and three World Athletics Championships, and set and broke numerous records.

However, her life and career were devastated by accusations that Semenya—who was born with naturally elevated levels of testosterone—was not a woman and should not compete against other women. Required by the International Association of Athletics Federations to take hormone-altering drugs as a condition of competing in certain events, Semenya for years suffered side effects that she describes as devastating to her health. Her predicament surfaced a still-raging firestorm over our understanding of gender, of how gender plays out in sports, and our expectations of female athletes.

The Race to be Myself tells the coming-of-age story of an iconic athlete—of Semenya’s dramatic journey from a gifted and self-trained novice to the pinnacle of her sport—and takes readers behind the scenes of her inspiring battle to run in the “body that God gave me.”