Recently, Semenya told the Guardian, “It’s not so easy. The university is O.K. but there is not many other places I can go. People want to stare at me now. They want to touch me. I’m supposed to be famous.” She added, “I don’t think I like it so much.”

The law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf announced in September that it was taking on Caster Semenya as a client. It is still sorting through what happened and deciding whom to sue. One afternoon, I drove with Benedict Phiri, an associate in the firm’s Johannesburg office, across the Blood River from Polokwane to Ga-Masehlong to meet Semenya’s mother. Ga-Masehlong is a small village dotted with jacaranda trees; goats graze on the garbage and the grass on the roadsides. The houses have tin roofs, and people put rocks on top of them to keep them from blowing away. There are satellite dishes in several yards, but most people have dug their own wells and collect firewood from the bush for cooking. Everyone knows everyone else in Ga-Masehlong, and it was easy to get directions to the house of the champion.

At the Semenya home, there was a flyer tacked to the front door promoting a lecture that Julius Malema was giving at the local elementary school. Phiri knocked. We heard shuffling and then the sound of locks turning and bolts sliding. Phiri called out that he was Caster’s lawyer, but nobody came to the door.

A few minutes later, a pretty girl wearing an orange fleece jacket walked into the yard and introduced herself as Maphela. She said she was fourteen. “Do you want my story?” she asked in English. “I am Caster’s sister! But I am not like her. I am different from Caster.” I asked her what she meant, and Maphela replied emphatically, “I am not that way.”

Maphela looked toward the window where her mother, Dorcus, was hiding her face behind the curtain and motioning vigorously for her daughter to stop speaking with us. We asked Maphela if she would tell her mother that Phiri was Caster’s lawyer. Maphela ran off toward the back door.

We sat on the stoop of a cooking hut in the Semenyas’ front yard, and waited with the chickens and the goats. An elderly neighbor named Ike came into the yard. “Caster has done a wonderful thing,” he said. “This has brought to mind when the Philistines were persecuting the Israelites.” Ike told us that he just wanted to check on the family and see how their visit from Julius Malema the previous evening had gone. This made Phiri nervous.

After a few minutes, Maphela returned. She told us that her mother would not meet with Phiri, because she did not agree that Caster should have a lawyer.

As we drove away through the bush, Phiri called his boss in Johannesburg, a white former rugby player named Greg Nott. I could hear Nott yelling through the phone. “We knew this would happen all along,” Phiri said, trying to calm him. “Julius Malema is Chuene’s ally, and Julius is giving Caster money.”

On the occasion of the A.N.C. Youth League’s sixty-fifth anniversary, in October, Julius Malema presented Caster Semenya with a hundred and twenty thousand rand (about sixteen thousand dollars) at a gala dinner in Johannesburg. “I can even see it,” Phiri said on the phone. “They probably told the mom, ‘People will come and say they’re her lawyer. Don’t believe it.’ ” Phiri was afraid that Malema would step in and persuade the family to side with Chuene, who comes from the same region, and whose interests might not be served by lawyers poking around. One of the first things that Dewey & LeBoeuf did when the firm took the case was to ask both A.S.A*.* and the I.A.A.F. to provide documentation of the tests and any other pertinent paperwork; neither organization has fully complied.

The firm is representing Semenya pro bono, so good publicity will be its only reward. “And that,” Phiri said, “could blow up in our faces.”

Nobody wants Chuene out of office more than an old friend and colleague named Wilfred Daniels, who started at A.S.A*.* with him, sixteen years ago. “From day one we connected, in the struggle days, you know?” Daniels said. “We were like, we belong together.” Both Daniels, fifty-eight, and Chuene, fifty-seven, grew up as promising athletes who could never compete internationally because of apartheid. They understood each other then, but not anymore.

Daniels—whom everyone calls Wilfie—is the unofficial mayor of Stellenbosch, a leafy college town in the wine country. He likes to hold court at the Jan Cats restaurant, in front of the elegant Stellenbosch Hotel. As he sat at his street-front table on a sunny afternoon in a green Izod jacket and track pants, drinking a bottle of Chenin blanc, every other person who passed by stopped to pay his respects, or at least waved at him driving by. Daniels was a famous athlete in his youth, and he is even more famous now. In early September, he resigned from A.S.A*.* in protest over its handling of Caster Semenya, and had since been in the papers constantly. “We allowed it,” he said. “If we as management were on our game, we would’ve objected. We accompanied her to the slaughter. And that is my dilemma.”

Daniels was not directly involved in the testing or the coverup. During the first training session in Berlin, “while she was warming up and stretching, putting on her spikes, she told me they had done tests on her. I said, ‘What tests?’ ” Semenya told him that she didn’t know what they were for, but she described what had happened. “They put her feet in straps and ‘they work down there,’ she said. They told her it was dope tests.” Semenya had undergone routine doping tests many times before. She knew that this was something very different.

“If you and me who come from the big cities, if we find it repulsive, I mean, what about a rural girl,” Daniels said. “She doesn’t know what’s happening around her. She’s seven, eight months in the city now, in Pretoria, a new life altogether, and nobody takes the time to explain to her?” He shook his head in disgust. “It was unprovoked talk, and she’s not somebody who talks, normally. And she spoke to me as a Colored guy, as a man, about intimate, female things. That to me was like a cry for help.”

The sins of A.S.A*.*, as Daniels sees it, are, first, not giving Semenya adequate information about the Pretoria tests—including her right to refuse them—and, second, not pulling her out of the competition in Berlin.

“It’s the day before the championships,” Daniels said. “Eighteen years old, your first World Championships, the greatest race of your life. You can’t focus, because you have to go for gender testing. And you come back and you have to watch on TV: they are explaining the possibilities. I found her in her room, sitting in front of the TV like this,” Daniels put his hand up to his face to show how close she was to the screen. “And they’re talking about her and she’s trying to understand what they’re saying. Because nobody has spoken to her, to tell her, Look, this is what these tests might mean. I felt so ashamed.”

Daniels has worked in various capacities at A.S.A. over the years, first in management, then as a coach, and, most recently, as A.S.A*.*’s coördinator with the High Performance Centre, the program at the University of Pretoria where Semenya is now. Daniels does not agree with the I.A.A.F.’s assessment that Semenya’s seven-and-a-half-second improvement was “supernatural.” She went from training on the dirt roads of Limpopo to a world-class facility. She is also an extraordinarily hard worker. “Understand: Maria Mutola is her hero,” Daniels said. “So she had wonderful goals and ideals for herself; she was really trying to emulate her hero one day.” Maria Mutola is a runner from Mozambique whose event, like Semenya’s, was the eight hundred metres. Mutola also happened to have a strikingly masculine appearance.

Daniels believes that the best that can happen for Semenya at this point is to have a career like his. He has travelled the world and met many of his heroes. He has a cellar with more than two thousand bottles of red wine. He eats his grilled springbok at Jan Cats and clearly enjoys being a local eminence. But it is probably not the life he would have led if apartheid hadn’t prevented him from competing internationally; and it is not the life that was in front of Caster Semenya before she went to Germany. “I understand that her running days are over,” Daniels said.

There’s another scenario, in which Semenya’s story could become one of against-all-odds victory. The I.A.A.F. could apologize and decree Semenya female. Kobus van der Walt, the director of sport at the High Performance Centre, pointed out that though Semenya has beaten the South African record for her event, she hasn’t come anywhere near Kratochvílová’s world record, which means that there are plenty of women with a chance of besting Semenya. Conceivably, one day we will see Caster Semenya at the Olympics with a medal hanging from her neck. She could be the poster child for triumphant transgression.

But that is not what Daniels thinks will happen. “Now her life is over,” he said. “Not only as an athlete but as a human being. Even if the I.A.A.F. says there’s nothing wrong with her, people will always look at her twice. There should be hell to pay for those responsible.” He pounded his fist on the table. “I’ve got a daughter. If that was my daughter, what would I have done as a father? Somebody might have been dead by now.”

On November 5th, Chuene and the entire board of A.S.A*.* were suspended by the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee, pending an investigation into how they handled Caster Semenya.

One afternoon at the High Performance Centre, I sat up in the bleachers, killing time before a meeting with Kobus Van der Walt. I was surrounded by a spread of neatly partitioned fields, like a Brueghel painting: there are twenty-four cricket nets, six rugby fields, twenty-two outdoor tennis courts, nine soccer fields, seven squash courts, and a track surrounded by a three-thousand-seat stadium, all kept in impeccable condition. Runners in little packs zoomed around the fields and into the distance. Spring sunlight flicked along the blue of the swimming pool.

A figure in a black sweatshirt with the hood up walked along the path about thirty yards in front of me. There was something about this person’s build and movements that drew my attention. I got up and followed along the path, until I caught up to the person where he or she was stopped behind the cafeteria, talking to a waiter and a cook, both of whom were much shorter than she was. It was Caster Semenya.

She wore sandals and track pants and kept her hood up. When she shook my hand, I noticed that she had long nails. She didn’t look like an eighteen-year-old girl, or an eighteen-year-old boy. She looked like something else, something magnificent.

I told her I had come from New York City to write about her, and she asked me why.

“Because you’re the champion,” I said.

She snorted and said, “You make me laugh.”

I asked her if she would talk to me, not about the tests or Chuene but about her evolution as an athlete, her progression from Limpopo to the world stage. She shook her head vigorously. “No,” she said. “I can’t talk to you. I can’t talk to anyone. I can’t say to anyone how I feel or what’s in my mind.”

I said I thought that must suck.

“No,” she said, very firmly. Her voice was strong and low. “That doesn’t suck. It sucks when I was running and they were writing those things. That sucked. That is when it sucks. Now I just have to walk away. That’s all I can do.” She smiled a small, bemused smile. “Walk away from all of this, maybe forever. Now I just walk away.” Then she took a few steps backward, turned around, and did. ♦