You can’t beat Winston the pigeon, who topped Telkom’s ADSL download speed in KZN this week. And a brilliant public relations campaign for the little company, The Unlimited Group, that came up with the idea. Boy, did they hit a nerve among us frustrated bandwidth users in SA.

While Winston has his own site from which he tweeted during training and the race, The Times gets my vote for spunky coverage by virtue of this great headline:   Telkom can kiss my feathered butt.

Moneyweb was very quick off the mark on race day, Wednesday, and on then on Thursday they had a response from Telkom, which says it is not The Unlimited Group’s service provider. The statement is in tecchie Telkom speak and here’s the gist:

It must be noted that Telkom’s only involvement by way of service provisioning is the actual ADSL access lines. Contrary to speculation, the customer has an up-to 512kbps service at his Howick site from where the “race” commenced – and not Telkom’s up-to 4Mbps ADSL service.

The incredibly compelling tale of our sports hero Caster Semenya and her gender controversy has exploded today with an Ozzie paper claiming she has both male and female sex organs. What does this all mean, if it’s true? Tricky one. According to local sports science blog, The Science of Sport, there are so many different degrees of male and female, that this if far from a simple issue. This story is going to be BIG this weekend.

One SA newspaper editor has already weighed in on the story of the leaked report to the Ozzie paper, The Sydney Morning Herald. The The Daily Dispatch editor says on his blog:

This is not a time for freak show giggles, it is a time for compassion. It is a time for South Africans to stand as one, not for some ideal of nationhood or other vague notion, but for a young woman who needs to know that in our eyes she is what she always thought she was.

And then 2oceansvibe had a very funny post about a Cape Town women stuck (in T-shirt and knickers) on the window ledge of her home while she was cleaning the windows. There’s pics but our young Capetonian need not fear pillory: she is clearly a gym bunny and looks fabulous in her hot-pants broekies.

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And the prize for Shameless Popularism goes to the ANC for pouncing on poor Caster Semenya when she arrived back in SA to claim her as their latest struggle victim.

Pic: Creative Commons, Flickr, Anyaka

All that was missing was anguished cry of “Amaaaaaandla” at OR Tambo Airport in Joburg yesterday when first ANC Youth League President Julius (or is that Julia?) Malema and then ANC Women’s League Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (plus President Jacob Zuma speaking later from Pretoria) trumpeted the 18-year-old athlete as a victim of oppressive forces  — those being the racist West, of course, and the media. Shades of Robert Mugabe, I hear you say, and if their opportunism wasn’t so pathetically transparent, I’d agree. Read The Times story here on her arrival.

Semenya won the 800m gold medal at the International Association of Athletics Federations’ World Athletics Champs in Berlin, last week amid controversy about her gender.

Now let’s remind all at Luthuli House what this is about: an 18-year-old girl who is truly a stupendous athlete. She’s already been through media hell in Berlin and now you guys are doing the same to her back home by making her a poster girl for the fight against racism. Shame on you.

I’d say it’s up to Semenya and her coach to decide whether to go through — or not — with the gender test and not a bunch of politicians with bugger all imagination. Lay off the girl, please. This does you no credit.

Meanwhile News24 has an interesting story up  about an Ozzie doctor and researcher who has looked into the hormonal aspect of the case and declared that there is very large range of so-called “normal” testosterone levels that could naturally occur in women.

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Poor Caster Semenya, the South African 18-year-old who won the 800m in Berlin last night amid controversy over whether she is in fact a woman.

Sure, she’s missing the female hour-glass but women comes in all shapes and sizes, especially elite athletes so I’m with her on this one — and what a beautiful runner. Still, she’s going to have to take the gender test to shake off the doubts and one hopes that when she’s proved she’s a women, she’ll say: “And screw you all, you jealous cows!”

If you mised the race, here it is:

And here’s Michael Johnson on the controversy:

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