The Women's Ski Champion Who Turned Out to Be a Man and Accepted It

No matter how sympathetic their story, we used to understand that men shouldn't compete as women

Erik Schinegger was born in 1948 in Agsdorf, Austria, surrounded by the steep slopes of the Carinthia Valley. These slopes would later beckon him to become a world-class skier, first in the women’s category and then in the men’s.

When the midwife announced, “It’s a girl!” the infant boy was named Erika.

I was alerted to Schinegger’s story by Amy E. Sousa, a writer and women’s rights activist who pointed him out in relation to the Olympic boxing scandal. While there was so much confusion and argument about what to do with two male boxers who were competing against women, Sousa noted that here was a man who stopped competing against women when he found out he was male and who, in fact, eventually gave back his world championship medal.

Schinegger was born with a disorder of sexual development (DSD) that caused him to be misidentified as female at birth. Though these conditions are exceedingly rare in the general population, such men are overrepresented in female sports categories due to their male advantage. Perhaps the most famous such case in modern times, at least until this past Olympic boxing controversy, was Caster Semenya.

As former president of Athletics Alberta Dr. Linda Blade wrote for Reality’s Last Stand, “From the moment the IOC reluctantly allowed women to compete in the Olympics back in the early 20th century, situations arose where male athletes were discovered competing in the women’s category.”

Like many of these athletes, Schinegger was told from birth that he was a girl and did indeed believe himself to be one. However, he always knew he was different and didn’t fit many girly stereotypes, for example, preferring matchbox cars to dolls. During adolescence, he noticed that he wasn’t maturing like the other girls, namely that he didn’t begin menstruating nor develop breasts. Distressingly, he started having feelings for girls as well.

Since Schinegger didn’t fit in with girls or boys, he took refuge in sports. At age eight, he made himself his first pair of skis from barrel staves. He would watch hours of televised ski races, memorizing the techniques of the era’s stars. At age 12, he won his first race. At age 16, he was invited to join the Austrian National Youth Team.

Just after turning 18, Schinegger had his breakout moment at the 1966 World Alpine Ski Championships in Portillo, Chile. After a dominant French performance, Austria’s last hope for a gold medal lay on the dangerously steep women’s downhill course. The leader was France’s Marielle Goitschel. Schinegger flew down the slopes and beat Goitschel’s time by an eight of a second. Austria named him athlete of the year.

Still troubled by questions about why he had never developed like other young women, Schinegger focused everything on his goal of winning all three alpine gold medals—slalom, giant slalom, and downhill—at the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble, France. In training, he was usually several seconds ahead of the women and often as fast as the men, sometimes even beating them. For Schinegger, there was nothing better than skiing.

But everything was about to change. In 1968, the Olympics finally introduced sex testing via a quick and easy cheek swab which can reveal a person’s chromosomes. The test revealed the answer to why Schinegger had always suspected that something was wrong: he was male.

In the moment when Schinegger was facing the biggest goal of his career, his world crashed around him. He, of course, was told that he could not compete. A hospital confirmed that he had internal testicles.

According to Schinegger, the Austrian Ski Association attempted to persuade him to undergo treatment with female hormones so that he would not lose his world championship gold medal. Schinegger, however, chose to accept that he was a man, began going by the name Erik, and reportedly underwent months of surgery. The details of these surgeries are unknown aside from reports that they externalized his male genitals.

Unfortunately, even though all he did was begin living as the man he really was, Schinegger was met with quite a lot of hostility because of the taboo nature of his experience. Still feeling isolated, he once again threw himself into his training with the intention of continuing to ski in the male category.

Schinegger did indeed resume racing in the men’s category at the Europa Cup Tour, winning three races. Despite this and despite outperforming many of Austria’s best male skiers, the national team chose to omit him, citing “media unrest.” The team was worried that he would make headlines and harm their reputation.

And so, at the age of 22, a heartbroken Schinegger retired from skiing.

And herein lies the true tragedy of the situation. It’s not that Schinegger wasn’t allowed to compete against women. Though that was surely a very difficult and confusing time for him, protecting the female category had nothing to do with hurting him and everything to do with ensuring fair and safe sports for women. Plus, at the end of the day, it revealed to Schinegger who he really was, finally providing the answer to a lifetime of uncertainty. It also revealed his character.

The real tragedy is that Schinegger then could not compete in the men’s category, where he rightfully belonged, through no fault of his own. The tragedy is that people were looking at sex, which is really quite simple and straightforward, through the lens of socially constructed “gender.” They just could not wrap their heads around someone who was previously considered a “woman” now living and competing as a “man,” even though Schinegger was just a man who had been a man all along.

I’m not one who thinks that sex roles and stereotypes are necessarily evil and must be destroyed. Men and women are different in ways beyond pure physicality and a lot of our preferences and behaviors stem from those differences. But, as this case makes obvious, letting the social aspects of our sex take such precedence over sex itself leads to significant discomfort and confusion about the topic.

This discomfort and confusion led the IOC to discontinue sex testing entirely in 1999, even though the vast majority of female athletes were in favor of it. This move once again opened the door for males with DSDs to compete and sometimes dominate the female category, like Caster Semenya.

Semenya is actually a fantastic case in point about all of this confusion. The media created a narrative that he is a female with naturally higher levels of testosterone, so why shouldn’t a biological female enjoy a particular advantage when other advantages are not singled out? This blatant lie still has many people utterly confused to this day, when the situation is really very simple. Semenya is a man with a condition known as 5-ARD. This condition results in underdeveloped male genitals which can be mistaken for female at birth. However, such men have internal testicles that allow them to go through typical male puberty. Schinegger likely has a similar if not the same condition.

Today, Semenya admits to having testicles but maintains that they don’t make him “less a woman.” And many people nod right along with this assertion because the rise of postmodernism, queer theory, and gender ideology have confused us even more than in Schinegger’s day.

At least in Schinegger’s situation, though it was hard for people to wrap their heads around it, there was no question that he could no longer compete with women. Today, when a similar situation arises, as with Semenya or the two Olympic boxers, a not insignificant portion of people still maintain that these men should in fact compete against women. This is because, where “woman” used to have a socially constructed aspect but was still underpinned by actual physical sex, it is now nothing more than a feeling or an idea. Many have forgotten entirely why sports have sex categories in the first place.

But it would not be cruel to tell these men, “Sorry, this category is not for you,” just as it was not cruel in Schinegger’s case. And yes, it was a very difficult thing for him to go through as a young man, but people having difficulties in life is no reason to exempt them from sensible rules that everyone else follows. Many female athletes today are having to go through difficulties and devastation because they lose out on team spots and podiums due to men competing in their categories, but they get no sympathy from people who make the rules.

As for Schinegger, like a properly resilient human, he moved on. In 1975, he opened a highly successful ski school. In 1978, he fathered a daughter and considered it to be one of his proudest achievements. Imagine if Schinegger had instead opted to take female hormones in a bid to continue living the lie that he was female and the hope to continue competing as one. He would not have ever experienced his greatest joy.

In 1988, during a televised broadcast, Schinegger also presented his world championship gold medal to Marielle Goitschel, the technical runner-up and true women’s champion. He called Goitschel the real winner.

Today, Schinegger is a grandfather and his ski school is still in operation. Recognizing his true sex and no longer competing in the female category because of it did not destroy his life. In fact, he has openly come out against men competing in women’s sports. Speaking to MailOnline in 2019, Schinegger explained:

'I thought I was naturally just better than the other Austrian skiers, including the men. But in fact, as we now know, I was a man myself.

'I used to get offended when the men would say it was unnatural and it was impossible for a girl like me to beat them. 

'It was only later that I found out what they were saying was true and it was impossible.'

Schinegger’s attitude is, unfortunately, a dwindling one. Today, male athletes with DSDs that caused them to be incorrectly identified as female at birth are encouraged to see themselves as victims—victims of sexism, racism, transphobia, white supremacy, colonialism, and the list goes on. Woke social justice activists will seek to apply every type of bigotry under the sun to the situation rather than just admit the reality that some men are misidentified as female at birth but that doesn't mean it's right for them to compete against women.

Of course, explaining the physical reality of the situation to these social justice warriors has no effect at all because, to them, reality is only linguistically and socially constructed. They do not believe in living in the world as it is. Rather, they believe they have a moral duty to live in the world as it should be. The problem is that they very often believe that men should not have a physical advantage and that there should not be any differences between men and women at all. It doesn't matter to them that a man competing against women is unfair and potentially unsafe because it simply should not be unfair and unsafe.

I believe we need to state our case for those who are genuinely confused, but I just as strongly believe that it is no use arguing with fantasists. My hope is that there are still more people who live in reality or who at least want to live in reality. These are the people who have the moral case and mandate to steward women's sports, otherwise, we can continue saying goodbye to it. Let's hope enough people come to their senses to make this possible.

Then, perhaps, we can get to an even better place than we were in 1968. We can protect the women's category, and we can make more of the world understand that there is nothing shameful or confusing about men who were mis-sexed at birth. These men have value, they don't have to pretend to be something they are not, and they can lead happy lives. They just can't compete against women.

Sources

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Fry, John. 2001. “Women's Champ Was a Man!” SKI. February 15, 2001. https://www.skimag.com/uncategorized/womens-champ-was-a-man/.

“Der Großvater, Der Weltmeisterin War.” 2015. DER STANDARD. https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000012012593/erik-schinegger-der-grossvater-der-weltmeisterin-war.

“Man Who Won ’66 Women’s Downhill Gives up Medal.” L.A. Times Archives. 1988. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-11-19-sp-422-story.html.

Blade, Linda. 2024. “The Dystopian History of Sex Testing in Women’s Sports.” Reality’s Last Stand. January 1, 2024. https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/the-dystopian-history-of-sex-testing.

Bramble, Matthew S., Allen Lipson, Neerja Vashist, and Eric Vilain. 2016. “Effects of Chromosomal Sex and Hormonal Influences on Shaping Sex Differences in Brain and Behavior: Lessons From Cases of Disorders of Sex Development.” Journal of Neuroscience Research 95 (1–2): 65–74. https://doi.org/10.1002/jnr.23832.

“Caster Semenya Q&A: Who Is She and Why Is Her Case Important?” BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/av-embeds/67367157/vpid/p0gr80vc.

Leidig, Michael. 2019. “Intersex Skiing Champion  Say Transgender Women Should NOT Compete in Female Events.” Mail Online, March 5, 2019. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6772989/Intersex-skiing-champion-say-transgender-women-NOT-compete-female-events.html.