Nancy Navalta was not the first controversial athlete who undergo gender questions. Other Filipina female sprinters Mona Sulaiman, Juliette Poulding, and Gina Sucopol created gender issue questions?

In the early 1990s, seventeen-year-old Nancy Navalta burst into Philippine track and field, running the 100 meter dash at 11.44 seconds. It’s an even more amazing feat considering how green she was. Nancy had no training. She just ran on sandy beaches with a sack of rocks slung over her shoulders.

Newspapers lauded this daughter of a fisherman, this girl who went from being a stonepicker from Luna to star athlete. Her early wins made her eligible to join the national training program. Some commentators began to talk about the Atlanta Olympics.

Nancy never did get to Atlanta. The idea that a female newcomer can run so fast, coupled with features like her “flat chest,” “muscled physique,” and a “wispy mustache” raised suspicions that Nancy Navalta was male.

“Nobody noticed me when I was losing,” Nancy later said in a 2004 interview.* “But when I started winning, they began questioning my gender.”

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