IT WORKED FOR RENEE RICHARDS

Olympic athletes have been required to submit to chromosome gender testing since the 1968 Summer Games at Mexico City, but that soon will be a thing of the past, if Arne Ljungqvist has his way.

Ljungqvist, of Sweden, is the IOC’s medical commissioner and says gender testing must go because it is “outdated, unethical and unlawful in some countries.” It became an issue in the ‘60s when some athletes competing as women were found to be males. Chromosome testing has since been done on scrapings taken from the insides of cheeks.

Ljungqvist said that kind of testing not only is outdated but unreliable.

“There are men with chromosomes like women and vice versa,” he said. “If we screen for sex using this test, some women will be screened out and some men will pass.”

Last week at an IOC session, Ljungqvist called for the test to be dropped from the new medical code, which the IOC hopes to have approved sometime this year.

But Prince Alexandre de Merode of Monaco, chairman of the medical commission and one of the instigators of the controversial test, wants to keep it in the code.

“We must have a system to see if rules are respected or not,” he said.