Santhi Soundarajan

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Santhi Soundarajan ( S. Santhi ; born April 17, 1981 in Kathakkurichi , Tamil Nadu ) is an Indian middle and long distance runner .

Life

Santhi Soundarajan comes from a village in the Pudukkottai district . She has lived in poverty since birth. After school, during which she learned neither English nor Hindi fluently, Santhi began a sporting career as a track and field athlete. She started at the national competitions in India and won in July 2005 in Bangalore on the 800-meter, 1500-meter and 3000-meter courses for women. At the Asian Athletics Games in Incheon , South Korea, she won the silver medal in the 800 meters in 2005.

At the 2006 Asian Games in Doha , Qatar , she won the silver medal in December 2006 in a time of 2 minutes, 3.16 seconds. However, she was stripped of the medal shortly afterwards, as Santhi, as a case of female hyperandrogenism (physical overproduction of male hormones), was not classified as a woman in a sex determination test . It subsequently became known that she had been denied a job on the sports team of the Indian Railway Company before her international career because of a similar test. After the Asian Games, she was offered a job with the police in her state Tamil Nadu, but was soon fired after a medical examination for allegedly ambiguous sex.

In September 2007, Santhi Soundarajan attempted suicide . Two months later, she began to work as a track and field trainer at a training academy that she founded. After she was unable to continue this, she worked as a day laborer in a brick kiln to ensure her survival. In the summer of 2013, the Indian Ministry of Sports awarded her a scholarship to train as a qualified trainer.

Gopi Shankar Madurai and the LGBT organization Srishti Madurai campaigned for Santhi Soundarajan from 2013 and launched the Justice for Santhi campaign in 2016, in which they drew attention to the discrimination against the athlete and more than one million signatures in a petition for justice for Santhi Soundarajan could collect. The campaign helped Soundarajan get a job with the Tamil Nadu Sports Development Agency.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Harmeet Shah Singh: India athlete makes plea for Semenya. In: CNN . September 14, 2009, accessed June 28, 2019.
  2. ↑ a b c Athlete-turned-daily wager Santhi Soundarajan gets ministry's helping hand ( Memento from July 17, 2013 in the Internet Archive ). In: NDTV of July 11, 2013, accessed on August 26, 2013 (English).
  3. ↑ Habeeb, Khubbieva win 100m races. In: People's Daily Online. December 10, 2006, Retrieved June 28, 2019 (Source: Xinhua ).
  4. ↑ a b K. P. Mohan: Santhi fails gender test. (No longer available online.) In: The Hindu . December 18, 2006, archived from the original on January 4, 2007 ; accessed on June 28, 2019 (English).
  5. ↑ Manish Kumar: Indian silver medalist trips over sex-test hurdle. Santhi Soundarajan was found lacking the 'sexual characteristics of a woman' during a medical test at the Doha Asian Games. In: DNA. December 17, 2006, accessed August 26, 2013.
  6. ↑ Chander Shekhar Luthra: Light at the end of the tunnel for Santhi Soundarajan. Doha silver medalist to undergo diploma course in athletics from NIS. In: DNA. June 5, 2013, accessed August 26, 2013.
  7. ↑ Sex-test failure attempts suicide. (No longer available online.) In: Fox Sports . September 6, 2007, archived from the original on October 3, 2012 ; accessed on June 28, 2019 (English). See Indian athlete Santhi survives suicide bid. In: The Times of India . September 5, 2007, accessed June 29, 2019.
  8. ↑ Sanjay Rajan: Interview. Santhi turns to coaching after suicide bid. In: Reuters India. June 9, 2009. Retrieved June 29, 2019.
  9. ↑ Srishti Madurai. Retrieved March 20, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Soundarajan, Santhi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES S. Santhi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian athlete
DATE OF BIRTH April 17, 1981
PLACE OF BIRTH Kathakkurichi , Tamil Nadu