At moderate levels, though, anabolic steroids give an athlete a very clear advantage, and this has led to a high-tech cat-and-mouse game between sports scientists trying to elevate testosterone levels illegally and the policemen of governing bodies like the IOC. The clear advantages testosterone bestows on athletes have also led to a much more controversial form of testing, the testing for an athletes sex. It had been suspected in some Olympic Games that gold medals in some womens events had actually been awarded to men, so the practice began of testing female athletes to see if they were indeed what they claimed to be. At rst this seemed a simple case of looking for a Y chromosome. If an athlete tested positive for XY, then he was a male. Simple. As a result of this test a handful of women at both the 1992 Barcelona and the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games were disqualied.

Unfortunately, the reasoning behind the tests was questionable. If a person has a Y chromosome then they do in fact produce testosterone, starting at the foetal stage. But what if that person has been born with a genetic disorder that makes them insensitive to testosterone? What if their testosterone receptors do not work? Then the testosterone will have no eect. This is precisely what happens in a condition called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome people with a Y chromosome produce testosterone, yet it does not masculinise them. Since the default sex of a foetus is female, these people will appear to all the world as women. Are they women? They think so, and who is to tell them otherwise? In the end the issue of establishing sexual identity became intractable and politically fraught. Many women athletes found the tests invasive, far too public, and almost medieval in their humiliation, like displaying the bedsheets of newlyweds. As a result, sex testing was dropped from the 2000 Sydne

TAKING THE HEDGE OUT OF HEDGED TRADES This is a glorious time for the trading desks: the ows are deep, the markets volatile yet optimistic. The Treasury traders nd themselves taking larger and larger positions and making more money than ever before. But the risks they take are as nothing compared to those taken on other desks. The real risks to a banks capital, and to its solvency, are usually found on the desks trading securities that carry credit risk, securities such as stocks, corporate bonds (ones issued by private companies), junk bonds (ones issued by private companies that are on the verge of bankruptcy), and mortgagebacked bonds.