It is a long way from the subtropical valley cradling Pretoria to the snow-clad mountains of Carinthia, in Austria, but if there is anyone who knows how Caster Semenya feels, as the 800 metres world champion awaits the results of her sex tests, it is Erik Schinegger.

The two places are bound by pride and prejudice, with the teenage South African and ageing Austrian bookending four decades of ignorance. Semenya will find out next week whether she is able to continue running as a woman. The African National Congress is demanding that her sex test results are nullified. For Schinegger, it is a repeat of the furore that greeted his coronation, exile and return with a new gender in 1968.

Schinegger was born to a