COACH Maria Mutola has predicted her new protege Caster Semenya can smash the women's 800m world record - a comment which has inflamed the global gender controversy over the young South African accused of being an intersex person.

Mutola said Semenya would have smashed the women's 800m world record had it not been for the gender controversy which erupted after her world title win at Berlin in 2009.

"She ran 1min 55.45sec when she was 18 (to win in Berlin)," Mutola, who won Mozambique's first Olympic gold when she won the 800m in Sydney, told South Africa's Sunday Times newspaper last weekend. "If there wasn't that (gender) problem she had there, she probably would have been 1:51, 1:52 right now,"

But the comment drew rebuke from Australia's 2008 World Indoor 800m champion, Tamsyn Lewis, who tweeted:

"That makes a mockery of women's 800! No true female can run 1.51,1.52!! Ridiculous!!"

The women's world record is 1:53.28 by Jarmila Kratochvilova run in Munich on July 26, 1983. It is the oldest record in the women's book.

Powerfully built, the Czech superstar - winner of the 400m in 47.99sec and the 800m at the inaugural athletics world championships in Helsinki in 1983 - was widely suspected of having been primed on banned anabolic steroids.

There are so many suspicious records in athletics, but only the women's 800m also has a gender issue attached.

And Mutola, the most dominant women's 800m runner in history, has inadvertently added fuel to the fire.

Since the International Association of Athletics Federation obliged Semenya to undergo gender verification tests and allegedly then follow a course of feminising hormones in association with an androgen blocker, Semenya has struggled to break 2mins.

But a change of coach to Mutola has brought a different perspective with Mutola firmly believing Semenya will get back to her world title winning time zone.

"She'll come back to 1:55 one day, then she will start believing again that she can go faster," she said.

Kenya's Pamela Jelimo was also the subject of gender investigation by the IAAF when she emerged in 2008 as an 18-year-old 400m sprinter of modest ability having never run 800m until she won the Kenyan Olympic selection trial.

She then dominated every race and won the Olympic title in 1:54.01.

Jelimo had been in poor form for three years but re-emerged this year to win the 800m at the World Indoor Championships in Istanbul in March.

So now almost anything goes and in a lengthy position paper published by the IAAF the only way to separate the boys from the girls seems to be by committee.

The IAAF addressed the issue, stating: "If there is any 'suspicion' or if there is a 'challenge' then the athlete concerned can be asked to attend a medical evaluation before a panel comprising gynaecologist, psychologist, internal medicine specialist, expert on gender/transgender issues."

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Originally published as Lewis blasts record claim