Laurel Hubbard lifted like someone who had much more on their shoulders than the weight on the bar.

The appearance of the first openly transgender woman to compete at an Olympic Games was brief and ignominious. At the Tokyo International Forum, she took the stage three times, failed to record a weight in the snatch.

Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand after her third unsuccessful attempt in the snatch ended her competition.Credit:AP

It meant she was unable to compete in the clean and jerk an exited the competition while it was just getting started.

For such an experienced lifter, it was a rookie error. After the bar slid behind her back on the third and final failed attempt, the New Zealander gave a rueful smile to the crowd, formed a love heart with her hands, then disappeared behind the curtain.

Given she is 43 years old it is unlikely we will see her again in Olympic competition. But then, Hubbard just getting to Tokyo was always a story in itself. Her presence her as served as both an inspiration to transgender people and gasoline on an already incendiary debate about the rights of women athletes in trans-inclusive sport.

“I know that from a sporting perspective I haven’t really hit the standards that I put upon myself and perhaps the standards that my country expects of me,” she said afterwards.

Over and out … Laurel Hubbard frustrated after her third attempt in the snatch.Credit:Getty

“But one of the things for which I am so profoundly grateful is I have supporters in New Zealand who have just given me so much love and encouragement.”

It was hard not to feel a little ashamed sitting in a cavernous conference room in downtown Tokyo, watching Hubbard labour under so much weight.

Normally, women’s weightlifting hardly rates a mention at an Olympic Games. Women who do little more than train, eat and sleep for years to get to an Olympics compete in relative anonymity, with only the most devoted aficionado or Chinese Communist Party apparatchik paying much attention to what goes on.

This time, the media seats and broadcasting positions were all filled and there was a waiting list of journalists wanting to talk to the Hubbard. With the exception of Chinese journalists, who had come expecting yet another gold medal performance from their world champion Li Wenwen, everyone was here for reasons that have nothing, and everything, to do with the sport.

When Hubbard took her leave early, many of those watching exited along with her.

Although it is unkind to say it, Hubbard’s trailblazing status makes her, to some eyes, a sideshow attraction; an oddity to gawk at, write about and pass judgement on, as if she somehow owes us an explanation for the course of her life, identity and sporting career.

That weightlifting is her chosen sport only increases the fascination. It is difficult to imagine another Olympic event where the advantages that come with a male biology and physiology are so apparent, nor a sport where it would more difficult to balance fairness to with the desire to include transgender women.

That Hubbard, at 43 and from a nation that has never medalled in Olympic weightlifting, came to these Games as an outside chance to finish on the podium suggests that the sport, for all its well meaning intentions, still has work to do to find the right balance.

Even if Hubbard had competed at her best, she would have been no match for Li Wenwen, who took the gold medal with a combined total of 320kg, a new Olympic record. But had she stayed in the competition, she would have been fighting for either silver or bronze with a handful of other lifters.

Although these were her first Games, Hubbard is not new to weightlifting. She was taught fundamentals when she was a teenager growing up in Auckland she lifted in men’s competition until the age of 23, when she abruptly gave up the sport. She returned to it 16 years later, after so much had changed.

Hubbard did not come here to make a socio-political statement or prove a point. She doesn’t want to convince anyone of what is right and wrong. If you want to debate these issues and argue about whether women’s rights and being trampled by the inclusion in women’s sport of athletes born male, you are better off sliding into JK Rolling’s DMs than trying to engage Hubbard.

There a humility and reservedness about her that sits in contrast with fierce public debate her return to the sport and selection on an Olympic team has triggered. She speaks in a quiet, considered voice and is clearly grateful for this second chance at her sport. In her only public comments since the announcement of her inclusion in Team New Zealand team, Hubbard last week said:

“I see the Olympic Games as a global celebration of our hopes, ideals and values and I would like to thank the IOC for its commitment to making sport inclusive and accessible.”

As far as the IOC and International Weightlifting Federation is concerned, there is no asterisk next to Hubbard’s name or ambiguity about her eligibility to compete in the women’s competition.

In 2015, the IWF adopted the IOC’s eligibility rules for sex-change athletes which requires athletes born as men to identify as women for four years before they compete and maintain testosterone levels below a specified amount for 12 months leading into competition.

Having undergone sex-reassignment surgery early in her transition, Hubbard would have qualified to compete as a woman under the old, more restrictive rules.

She also challenges the fairness of the IOC’s current criteria in a more complex way. Although she does not produce testosterone and has lost much of the strength and ability to recover from heavy training and injury that male sex hormones bring, she derives an advantage from the powerful, 105kg male physique she developed before transitioning.

Hubbard described the experience of lifting at an Olympic Games as electrifying. In her understated way, she has also delivered a jolt to world sport as it confronts its gender dilemma.

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