The 2016 athletics season may still be in its infancy but it came to life in incredible fashion last weekend. Caster Semenya, the 2009 800m world champion, completed an unprecedented treble; she won the 400m, 800m and 1500m at the South African Championships. It was not the victories which were so breathtaking however, it was the manner in which she achieved them. Her 400m time of 50.78 seconds was the fastest in the world this year, as well as a personal best by almost two seconds. Her 800m time of 1:58.45 was another 2016 world best and then she won the 1500m comfortably. The three victories were all completed in the space of an afternoon.

These performances indicate that Semenya is back to her best after a rocky few years. You may recall that in the aftermath of her 2009 world title, which she won as an 18 year-old, Semenya became one of the biggest stories in sport yet it was not her times on the track that were making the headlines. Questions about the South African’s gender were raised and she was subjected to gender tests. The results were never made public but according to reports in the Australian media, they showed that she had no womb or ovaries but internal testes. It was also reported that she had three times the normal level of testosterone of a woman. At the time of those tests, Pierre Weiss, the IAAF secretary general, said: "It is clear that she is a woman, but maybe not 100 percent.”

The Semenya furore resulted in sports’ governing bodies implementing an upper limit of testosterone for female athletes, with any woman above that limit being required to take hormones to lower their testosterone levels. Since this ruling Semenya won world silver in 2011 and Olympic silver in 2012 but was not the dominant athlete that she had been when she broke onto the scene as a teenager.

Her resurgence in form this year is likely to be down to a ruling by the Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS) last year. Following a case involving the Indian sprinter, Dutee Chand, the rules that gave an upper limit of testosterone in women were suspended, allowing female athletes who were on testosterone-suppressing medication to come off it. Ross Tucker, the prominent South African sports scientist, has predicted that the Rio Olympics will be “messy” and it will be down to this ruling by CAS. He believes that the previous rule, with an upper testosterone limit, was appropriate and a line between male and female athletes must be drawn.

Yet this is where things get tricky; where should that line be because almost all athletes at the top of their field possess genetic advantages? Kristen Worley is a Canadian elite transitioned XY female cyclist who alleges that the IOC’s gender-verification policies and their policies on hormone regulations and the selected levels of testosterone for females are discriminatory. Her case was presented in the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario yesterday and a result is imminent; the ruling could have enormous consequences for sport and change the current way of thinking when it comes to female athletes. Worley also worked with Semenya on her case and so knows this topic better than most.

“As a society, we tend to punish difference and hurt what we do not understand,” Worley told me when we spoke earlier this week. “Look at Usain Bolt- look at all the variations of men who are lining up on the start line next to him, all the different physiologies. But it’s how we see women in society- we don’t allow that variation of women in sport like we allow the variation of men.”

It is the upper limit of permitted testosterone in female athletes that Worley has a particular issue with. “The IOC has put the issue of androgens blindly into the sports system without science,” she told me from her home in Canada. “You cannot talk about human performance if you do not understand the very basics of the role of hormones and specifically androgens in the human body. Clearly the IOC does not as they have never done the research. Science is showing that performance isn’t specifically related to testosterone.” Worley argues that by forcing a female athlete to lower her natural testosterone levels, you are risking making them unwell because you are taking her out of her ‘normal’.

It seems that the IOC and other sporting bodies do not quite know how to deal with the issue of gender verification. There is no easy answer and it is likely that no solution will appease everyone. If Semenya dominates in Rio this summer, as she threatens to do, the issue will be under the spotlight once again and while the South African may be the first high profile case of this nature, she will not be the last. A solution must be found because as Worley says, “We need to change the sports system, not the athletes; the athletes are the ones paying the ultimate price for it, and it has devastating personal consequences.” This statement is indisputable.