Caroline Fusco, "The Space that (In)Difference Makes: (Re)Producing Subjectivities in/through Abjection - A Locker Room Theoretical Study" in Vertinsky and Bale (eds.), Sites of Sport: Space, Place, Experience (p.172):

Sweat, dirt and some bodily fluid excretions are celebrated in sport for they are a mark of a hard workout (and often a mark of masculinity). … Yet there is a point when all these fluids, excretions and dirt (if these are not expelled onto the ice and into the grass) have to be dealt with, particularly when they start to smell, linger on the athlete's body and mix with the fluids of others. This is when the (social) body is/may be pressed to send these uncanny corporeal fluids somewhere else. … While recognizing that there are social and hygienic reasons for dirt and bodily excrements to be cleaned away, the rites of purification that are engaged in in locker rooms, such as washing, wearing foot protection, avoiding soiled toilet seats and so on, not only protect against infection but protect the subject from becoming (materially and psychically) contaminated by polluting pseudo-objects (like sweat, hair, faeces and urine). They enable respectability and propriety to be (re)produced.

A Zimbabwean athlete receives a 3 1/2-year prison sentence for masquerading as a female athlete (emphasis mine):

Samukeliso Sithole — a triple jumper and runner who competed as a woman at several international sports events — was convicted on charges of impersonation and offending the dignity of a woman athlete who undressed in his presence, unaware he was a man.

. . .

Sithole told the court at his first appearance that he had both female and male organs and that he lived as a woman after consulting a traditional healer. A medical examination showed that he was a man.

Two things jump out at me from this story. One has to do with the "crimes" that Sithole committed: impersonation and offending a woman's dignity. The first seems a little arbitrary to me — though I am not a lawyer, I believe that the crime of impersonation usually involves actually appropriating someone else's identity for personal gain. In this case, Sithole assumed a gender, not an individual identity. The purported offence of dignity is an extension of that gender role, not some Peeping Samukeliso trying to get a glimpse of women in segregated shower rooms.

Not only am I not a lawyer, but I am not a diviner of bullshit either. Nonetheless, let us assume for a moment that Sithole is telling the truth about being both male and female, and that a traditional healer advised that he should henceforth live as a woman. Then we have another example in which modern medical-scientific practice trumps traditional medicine, exposing yet again how the high performance athletic body is discursively constructed and subsequently policed.

Virilio, Pure War, p.54 (via Redhead): "History as the extensiveness of time — of time that lasts, is portioned out, organized, developed — is disappearing in favour of the instant, as if the end of history were the end of duration in favour of instantaneousness, and of course, of ubiquity."

It is at this point, in my opinion, that the Olympic Torch becomes vulnerable. More to follow …