Davies, left, who is leading a British bid to prevent trans athletes competing as women, with her 20-year-old daughter Grace, an ex-British junior heptathlete

As Sharron Davies lined up against Petra Schneider at the start of the 400m medley final at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, she knew that she had no chance of beating the East German. By Schneider’s own later admission, she had spent years being doped up to the eyeballs on testosterone as part of the Stasi’s drugs programme.

The East German swimmers that Davies, then 17, spent the best part of two decades competing against “looked like men and sounded like men”.

Davies — who competed for Britain at the 1976 Olympics aged 13 and won multiple Commonwealth and European medals before retiring in 1994 — finished with a silver medal behind Schneider, but that sense of injustice at having to compete against athletes who had