Meet Valentina Petrillo, the self-confessed male Paralympic sprinter who, at the age of 51, has entered the female competition and is set to steal the women’s prizes while the pathetic authorities look on. The Telegraph‘s Oliver Brown has the details of the latest brewing Olympic gender scandal.
“This was a dream,” says Valentina Petrillo, who today became a Paralympic sprinter at the age of 51, “that I had since I was a little girl.” Except this is an athlete who was never a little girl in the first place. The Italian is a father-of-two who was still competing at 45 as a male, who won national titles in men’s track and field, and whose self-portrayal in 2021 was of a “tough guy who would speak dismissively of women, who would have given you the idea he was sexist”. And yet on Monday morning at the Stade de France, Petrillo, courtesy of institutional cowardice at every level, lined up in the visually-impaired classification of the 400 metres as a woman.
There is no biological ambiguity about Petrillo. Here is a figure who, in a documentary aired this summer, announced to the interviewer: “You can see I’m a man.” Here is somebody who accepts that women are entitled to feel “astonishment, confusion and doubt” about this indefensible state of affairs, acknowledging: “These doubts and questions are legitimate.” But still Petrillo feels entitled to enter the female category for the sake of “happiness”. Quite where the happiness of the women forced out of the Paralympics as a consequence fit into this equation is anybody’s guess.
The residual advantages of Petrillo’s physiological development as male are not difficult to detect. Last year, this former computer scientist won a bronze medal at the World Para-Athletics Championships in Paris in the T12 200 metres, depriving Morocco’s Fatima Ezzahra El-Idrissi of a place on the podium. This was despite Petrillo being 18 years older than anyone else in the field.
A straight comparison of the athlete’s performances in the men’s and women’s categories tells its own story. Petrillo’s results were conspicuously mediocre by the standards of male para-sports, with personal bests of 25.69sec in the 200m and 58.01 in the 400. That would not even have come close to the minimum male qualifying standard at these Paralympics of 54.00. Through recategorising as a woman, though, everything changes. Running as male, Petrillo won 11 Italian para-athletics titles. As female, the most controversial participant at these Games has won 27 – not to mention eight Masters titles, six Italian Paralympic records, one place in a European final and two global medals. And all when at least two decades beyond a sprinter’s supposed peak.
Worth reading in full.
Brown notably avoids pronouns throughout his article, presumably to avoid having to comply with the Telegraph‘s ridiculous insistence on using people’s preferred rather than biologically correct pronouns and referring to a self-confessed man as “she”.
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