Canadian Women’s Downhill Biking Champ Used To Be a Man

By Mark Hoerrner

It was the second place winner who created all the fuss.

Getting beat doesn’t bring out the best in people, so when downhiller Michelle Dumaresq beat Danika Schroeter by a second, Schroeter went for a change of clothes. She then appeared on the winner’s podium wearing a t-shirt that read, "100% Pure Woman Champ 2006."

The problem Schroeter has with Dumaresq is that while Schroeter was born a woman, Dumaresq was born male. In the late 1990s, Dumaresq underwent a sex change. She was not a competitive biker at that point, but she had been riding bikes for years. It was not until her sex change that she started competing and doing so in the women’s category.

While she now produces lower levels of testosterone since her sex change, some female contenders say that even though she lost more than 30 pounds since her operation, she still possesses a significant weight and muscle advantage that gives her an unfair competitive advantage, some riders have told the Vancouver Sun. Dumaresq stands tall at 6’1" and weighs in at 180 pounds.

Once she started racing, she was an overnight success.

Schroeter has now been banned by the Canadian Cycling Association from the sport for three months. As one of the top five female bikers in the downhill competition, she will miss the World Championships in New Zealand in late August of this year.

Schroeter has apologized for wearing the shirt and her boyfriend, John Starcevic, who created the shirt and put it on his girlfriend "before she knew what she was wearing," Starcevic told the Sun.

Though Dumaresq has never been charged with using any kind of steroid, this brings a new wrinkle into the discussion of what should and shouldn’t be allowed in competitive sports. Dumaresq is now fully a woman, she protests, and the public generally accepts the story and her motives behind the sex change. What remains, however, is years of training muscle as a man, years of having testosterone refine the muscular structure and possessing a body structure that has only had three of her 30 years to adjust to the introduction of progesterone and estrogen.

Simply put, one Canadian blogger says, she’s reaping years of what could be considered steroid training much like the Eastern European Olympians who were for so long chemically altered.

"A coach I know made an analogy between Ms. Dumaresq and an athlete who dopes illegally for years, then cleans up their act: even though they are clean now, they still have an advantage from the years of "super-training" they were able to do," blogger Ryan Cousineau noted.

"In the simplest example, steroids are generally described as ‘recovery’ drugs. The big advantage is not that they somehow make you stronger, but that they speed up your ability to respond to (and bounce back from) hard training efforts: the result is you can train harder and more often with more effectiveness. Using an advantage like that allows a cheating athlete to build up base fitness that remains long after becoming ‘drug-free.’"