Gender Controversy 

Historically, sport's first encounter with disorders of sex development (DSD) was in 1936 at the infamous Berlin Olympics. Controversy during the games was most notably in the women's 100-metre sprint. Stella Walsh, a Polish-born athlete with US citizenship, and Helen Stephens, an American sprinter had competed in previous competitions – Walsh won the 100 meter sprint in 1932 and therefore attended Berlin as defending champion. Stephens finished just in front of Walsh, posting a world record time of 11.5 seconds; Walsh completed the sprint in 11.7 seconds.

Walsh publicly accused Stephens of being male after she won the 100-metre sprint in 1936. Since no formal gender verification program existed at this time, the Olympic committee felt compelled to perform a sex check on Stephens. It confirmed Stephens possessed female external genitalia.

Decades later following Walsh's murder a post-mortem examination confirmed that Walsh possessed ambiguous genitalia and abnormal sex chromosomes, although the exact DSD was not established.  

Dora Ratjen

Dora Ratjen was a German athlete who competed for Germany in the women's high jump at Berlin, finishing fourth, but was later discovered to be male.

In 1966, Time magazine reported that, in 1957, Dora had presented as Hermann, a waiter in Bremen, "who tearfully confessed that he had been forced by the Nazis to pose as a woman 'for the sake of the honor and glory of Germany'. Sighed Hermann: 'For three years I lived the life of a girl. It was most dull.