THE debate surrounding New Zealand’s Laurel Hubbard becoming the first ever transgender athlete picked to compete at an Olympic Games, is rumbling on- and most likely will do for some time.

Controversy has followed the decision by officials to select Hubbard for the women’s weightlifting team for Tokyo 2020, after qualifying requirements were recently modified.

Hubbard had competed in men’s events before coming out as transgender in 2013 and critics say the athlete has an obvious unfair advantage over her competitors.

This is not the first time something like this has happened in sport. The difference is, in decades past women found themselves competing against a male athlete without even knowing it.

Back in May of 1939 such a sporting scandal began after a world record took place right here in south Essex.

Nineteen year-old athlete, Dorothy Odam broke the world record for the women’s high jump at a meeting in Brentwood.

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It happened at the Whit Monday Hospital sports and fete at Brentwood when the young Surrey-based competitor cleared (5 ft 5 3⁄8 in) – half an inch more than the record set at the time by a German girl.

“Subject to official confirmation her jump will be regarded as the new world record in this event,” officials told the media.

The ‘German girl’ he was referring to was Dora Ratjen, who broke the record again shortly after.

Three years earlier at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, the pair had competed against each other. Odam came away with the silver medal (making her the first British woman to win an individual Olympic medal in athletics). Ratjen came in fourth. Odam later admitted she had harboured suspicions that all was not as it seemed with her fellow competitor. But it wasn’t until three years later that she made these suspicions public.

In 1939 when Odam received news that Ratjen had broken her new Brentwood-set record, she broke her silence.

Odam later recalled the incident: “They wrote to me telling me I didn’t hold the record, so I wrote to them saying, ‘she’s not a woman, she’s a man’ “They did some research and found ‘her’ serving as a waiter called Hermann Ratjen.” Indeed investigations did prove that Ratjen was in fact, biologically a man. He had been living as a female since childhood. But although at the time the saga caused shockwaves throughout the sporting world, only in recent years have facts shed light on what is now considered a very sad and complex story.

Ratjen was born near Bremen, into a family described as “simple folk”. His father, Heinrich Ratjen, stated in 1938: “When the child was born the midwife called over to me, ‘Heini, it’s a boy!’ But five minutes later she said to me, ‘It is a girl, after all.’”

Nine months later, when the child, who had been christened Dora, was ill, a doctor examined the child’s genitalia and, according to Heinrich, said “Let it be. You can’t do anything about it anyway.”

Ratjen himself said in 1938:“My parents brought me up as a girl and I therefore wore girl’s clothes all my childhood. But from the age of 10 or 11 I started to realize I wasn’t female, but male.”

After his gender identity came to light the athlete was arrested, and sent to a sports sanatorium for tests. The authorities did not bring any charges against Ratjen, who promised he would “cease engaging in sport with immediate effect”. As the dust settled on the episode, Dorothy Odam’s Brentwood world record was formally recognized by the sport’s world governing body and she went on to enjoy a accomplished sporting career.