Portrait
Dutee Chand
Born
3 February 1996Gopalpur, Odisha, India
SprinterIndia30th birthday

Dutee Chand

She challenged hormone-based eligibility rules, competed at two Olympics and publicly acknowledged her relationship with a woman.

Dutee Chand was born in Gopalpur, Odisha, in 1996. Raised in a family of weavers, she began running as a child and became one of India’s leading sprinters.

In 2014 she was excluded from competition under rules concerning naturally elevated testosterone. Her challenge to the international athletics federation reached the Court of Arbitration for Sport. In 2015 the court suspended the hyperandrogenism regulations while seeking stronger evidence for their justification, allowing her to resume competing.

Chand ran at the 2016 Rio Olympics and the delayed Tokyo Games in 2021. In 2019 she publicly discussed her relationship with a woman, becoming a prominent openly queer figure in Indian sport. The announcement brought support as well as hostility, including from members of her family, shortly after India had decriminalised consensual same-sex relations.

A separate anti-doping case later interrupted her career. In 2023 she received a four-year ban following positive tests for prohibited substances; an appeal was rejected in 2024. The later sanction concerned prohibited substances, while the earlier eligibility case had concerned hormones her body produced naturally.

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