Heats of the women’s 800m, Beijing Olympic Games 2008

My research on regulation, gender, and integrity in sports governance is fundamentally shaped by my experience as an Olympic athlete. In 2008, I competed for Australia in the 800m (Athletics) at the Beijing Olympic Games. In 2009, i had the opportunity to compete alongside future Olympic champion Caster Semenya at the World Championships in Berlin, where I witnessed the controversy unfold around her right to compete in the women’s category.

In 2012, following a career-ending injury, I remade my life by moving to the United States to undertake a PhD in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There, I had the opportunity to discover and engage with debates about the regulation of inclusion in the women’s category for the first time. My life has now come full circle, with questions of regulation, integrity, equity, and inclusion in international sport at the core of my scholarship.

Since 2020, I have had the privilege to work at the University of Lausanne––a global epicenter for the critical study of sports governance––where I am currently an SNSF Ambizione grant holder at the Institute of Social Sciences and Centre for Gender Studies.