[Cherie]

Alesser-known fact about Daley Thompson is that he is not merely Britain’s finest ever Olympian, but a crucial figure in agitating against the injustice of biological males competing in women’s sport. Long before these Paris Games were scandalised by sex tests revealing two boxers as having XY chromosomes, the male pattern, he was warning of the gathering storm. Quite apart from featuring in a campaign film last year called The Inclusion Delusion, he wrote in a report by think tank Policy Exchange: “We risk alienating a generation of female athletes if we cannot promise them fair and safe play – from the grassroots to the top.”

t 66, Thompson could be forgiven for ducking the toxic blowback this debate unleashes. And yet he feels strongly enough to rebuke the International Olympic Committee for neglecting to protect the female category, prioritising inclusion over fairness. As an illustration, he points to the 33-page “Portrayal Guidelines” document that the IOC have issued to journalists in Paris, advising against the use of such terms as “born male” or “biologically male” on the grounds that such labels are “dehumanising” and constitute “problematic language”.

“You only have to read the statement,” he says. “I don’t understand why they, as the world governing body, don’t take a stance. Instead, they tell everybody else to take a stance and then they chip away at the sides. I don’t understand that.”

I point out how Martina Navratilova, the nine-time Wimbledon champion and a steadfast figure in upholding the integrity of female sport, has accused the IOC of Orwellian tactics by waging a “1984 version of war on women”. “Martina knows this inside out,” Thompson nods. “I would agree with that. I would have thought that the defence of women’s sport should be very high on the IOC’s list.”

Sadly, it is anything but. In their insistence that womanhood can be determined by passport status alone, the IOC have created the astonishing situation where two biologically male boxers, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, are now guaranteed Olympic medals in the women’s competition. They were disqualified from last year’s world boxing championship by the International Boxing Association, who said the DNA of each fighter “was that of a male consisting of XY chromosomes”. Neither appealed against the findings.

I meet Thompson at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, before the eruption of the boxing scandal. But he leaves no doubt as to his views on the IOC’s spinelessness, presenting their failure to ensure a level playing field for women as an extension of their feeble stance on state-sponsored doping. “The IOC, in their different forms over the last 40 or 50 years, have been negligent in their duty towards the one thing they should be looking after, and that’s sport,” he argues. “They allowed the Eastern bloc countries to get away with it in the Seventies and Eighties. They could have done things about China. They could have done more. They should have done more.”

Having seen the convulsions triggered by the IOC’s gospel of inclusion at all costs, Thompson suggests his great friend Sebastian Coe as the ideal candidate to lead the Olympic movement once Thomas Bach steps down next year. Unlike Bach, Coe has shown decisive leadership on the most vexed of questions. In the women’s 800 metre final at the Rio Olympics in 2016, Caster Semenya took gold in a race where all three medallists had differences in sexual development. In response, Coe introduced a policy where any such athletes would have to reduce their testosterone levels to race as women.

“He would make a good president of the IOC, because I truly believe he has the athletes’ interests at heart,” Thompson says. “He does the things he thinks will be beneficial to them. Plus, he has had issues that nobody else has had to deal with. And he seems to have found a good way through them.”

Thompson has been drawn into his febrile sphere through his enduring bond with Sharron Davies. They dated briefly in the late Seventies and have remained friends ever since, with Davies persuading him to champion the cause closest to her heart. While Thompson took Olympic decathlon gold in Moscow in 1980, Davies had to settle for silver in swimming’s 400m individual medley – beaten by Petra Schneider of the former East Germany, who later admitted to having doped. For her, the spectacle of women being wrongly denied medals cuts deep. Fortunately, her ex-boyfriend has not taken much persuading to lend his support

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