Caster Semenya is back, so is her sport’s thorniest problem

CHAMPION runner Caster Semenya heads into this year’s world championships with virtually no chance to win.

On Wednesday in Eugene, Oregon, the 31-year-old, three-time world champion at 800 meters will run instead in the 5,000-meter race. She is not considered a serious medal contender. It’s the first time since she started dominating her favorite distance well over a decade ago that anybody has said that.

The South African chose to run in a race she doesn’t really want to be in, and one she’s not so good at, because she has declined to submit to rules in track and field that demand she take hormone-reducing treatments if she wants to enter the 800.

They are rules that Semenya, in a statement through her lawyer, calls “an affront to the spirit of the sport.”

Semenya was assigned female at birth, was raised as a girl and identifies as a woman. She