Monday, 28 Jul, 2008 Current Events

According to state media, Olympic specialists at Beijing set up a sex identification laboratory in order to check female Olympic athletes who are suspected to be males.

Xinhua news agency stated that professionals, working at the lab, which is located at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, will analyze doubtful cases based on their external features and observe sex hormones, genes and chromosomes from blood samples.

It is worth mentioning that sex testing has been practiced at the Olympic Games for many years. The reason to launch the procedure was the fears that male athletes might cheat pretending to be females.

In 2006 Asian Games officials retracted silver medal from an Indian athlete, Santhi Soundarajan, who failed a sex verification test.

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