Jim Morrison
Smash Authority
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/aug/24/oscar-pistorius-able-disabled
In this case, it might not be a clear advantage because the cons roughly outweigh the pros, but I can see this happening less and less in the future, as technology advances. Where do you draw the line between naturally gifted and well-trained and an unfair advantage?
Then there's genetic engineering, later on in the future. No doubt will they be able to also improve someone's athletic skill early on. Would this be considered cheating? How should the world of sports cope with this ever evolving technology which will soon surpass the human body.
Article a bit long? Basically, it's about Oscar Pistorius, a disabled Paralympics athlete who applied for the Olympics and has (by now) reached all qualifications needed to join. The question is wether or not a disabled person, aided by technology, should be allowed to compete with the able-bodied.
People call Oscar Pistorius all kinds of things: disabled, differently abled, an inspiration, an egotist, even a cheat. One label they never give him is the one he wants most of all: a runner, just like any other. At the World Athletics Championships in Daegu, Pistorius will take his place on the blocks for the heats of the 400m. There will be 45 men in the field, some tall, some short, some squat, some slender, some from the first world, some from the third. And yet Pistorius is the one who will be singled out as "different", physically and athletically.
Whatever transpires when he takes to the track Pistorius must hope that this event scotches some of the myths that surround him. He is sick of restating his case, particularly since the night of 19 July when he ran 45.07sec over 400m, making him the 18th fastest man over one lap of track this year. It gave him the "A" qualifying standard for the world championships and meant that, all of a sudden, some people saw him not as "disabled" but "too-abled" because of the blades he wears.
As Roger Black has said: "The faster he runs, the more people are going to say that he has an advantage and we are not on a level playing field." It is worth stepping back and reconsidering the role technology plays in enabling athletes. Since Mo Farah began training with Alberto Salazar at the start of this year, he has had access to, among other things, an anti-gravity treadmill, an underwater treadmill and a cryosauna. Farah is in the best form of his life. Try telling Farah's rivals from, for instance, Eritrea and Uganda, that they are on "a level playing field" when they toe the start-line.
Pistorius is not the first athlete to face these issues. Aimee Mullins, a double-amputee below the knee, was competing as a sprinter at national college level in the USA as long ago as 1995. She wore an early version of the Cheetah flex-foot which Pistorius uses today. In 2012 she will be the chef de mission for the US Paralympic team. She believes the criticism of Pistorius stems from a deeply ingrained prejudice: "If we allow a person, one who we view as our inferior, in whatever way, to play with us, and then that person beats us, what does that say about us?"
The British 400m runner Martyn Rooney has a simpler way of expressing a similar view: "It is the people who are worried about being beaten by him who are the ones who complain. If they're not running quick enough they're worried. If you're running quick enough you shouldn't have to worry."
There are two major misconceptions about Pistorius that need to be corrected. First, the Cheetah flex-foot blades he is running on have not changed in seven years. The 0.54sec improvement he recorded in his personal best in Rome this July owed everything to the changes he made above the knee, and nothing to changes below it, because there were none. Since he was involved in a serious boating accident in 2009, Pistorius has lived, trained and prepared like an elite athlete.
The second misconception is the idea that it is now open-season for the use of prosthetic technology in "able-bodied" athletics. The court of arbitration for sport ruling that overturned the International Association of Athletics Federations' original ban on Pistorius in 2007 was specific on this point: "This ruling does not grant a blanket licence … [it] has no application to the eligibility of any other amputee athletes, or to any other model of prosthetic limb; and it is the IAAF's responsibility to review the circumstances on a case-by-case basis." According to the ruling Pistorius would not even be able to use "any further development" of the Cheetah without undergoing more testing by the IAAF.
Those tests would have to examine whether future prosthetics contravened the same rule that the IAAF originally decided prevented Pistorius from competing. It was introduced at the exact time when Pistorius was first being invited to run in meetings against non-amputee athletes, and forbids the "use of any technical device that incorporates springs, wheels, or any other element that provides the user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device". As Pistorius's lawyers showed, unravelling the implications of this rule is not easy. CAS described it as "a masterpiece of ambiguity". What constitutes a "technical device"? Isn't every non-brittle object a form of spring in the sense that it has elasticity? And, most crucially of all, what is the specific meaning of "advantage"?
In 2008, CAS decided that the IAAF had prejudged Pistorius's case, and was actively looking for evidence that he should be banned from IAAF-sanctioned events. In the words of one IAAF mandarin at the time, "we are looking for advantages, not disadvantages".
So the IAAF commissioned scientific tests on Pistorius's performance when he was running in a straight line and after he had reached full acceleration. It was already known that, unlike the majority of 400m runners, Pistorius is slower over the first 200m and gets faster over the second 200m. He has a strong finish. But does that constitute a net advantage over the entire race? The obvious flip side is that Pistorius is slower than many competitors getting out of the blocks and accelerating around the first bend. As Rooney says: "The pros and cons weigh each other out. There are things that Oscar can do that I could never do, and things I can do that he could never do. Some people say he doesn't get cramp in his calf or his achilles but there is so much extra strain on the upper part of his leg that I think it balances out."
Pistorius certainly uses less vertical force than most runners. His stride is flatter and his hip-swing is faster. This is not necessarily an advantage. Many runners work on increasing their vertical force to improve their overall speed. And while it is fast, Pistorius's stride frequency is not out of the realms of that of other competitors. But this debate has still not been settled. Two of the scientists who worked on Pistorius's case, Peter Weyand and Matthew Bundle, have since decided that the relative lightness of the Cheetahs is what gives him a faster hip-swing, and calculated that it amounts to a 12-second improvement in his time over 400m. By that logic if Pistorius's closest contenders were on Cheetah blades they would be running 400m in 32 seconds. The world record stands at 43.18sec.
But that has not stopped them making headlines, not least when the South African sports scientist Dr Ross Tucker called the CAS ruling "a farce". Tucker is wrong when he suggests Pistorius's team could tinker with the technology, but he may be right to question whether Pistorius's blades affect his oxygen consumption, which has been calculated as 17% lower than is typical for a 400m runner. Measuring oxygen consumption is the one key way of assessing how much energy an athlete has to use during a race. If there is one clear advantage to the blades, it may lie here. Yet this is a debate that is taking place on the fringes of our knowledge and understanding, and the burden of proof lies with the IAAF. It has been unable to satisfy the CAS that Pistorius does have a metabolic advantage so significant that it outweighs all other considerations.
It may be more surprising to find criticism of Pistorius from within the Paralympic community. Dame Tanni-Grey Thompson has argued that: "If Oscar makes the Olympics then his event, the 400m, shouldn't be run at the Paralympics because the Paralympics should never be a 'B' final." By running here, Grey-Thompson says, Pistorius risks undermining the equality that the Paralympic movement has worked to gain.
But others, Mullins among them, would argue that the world championships will mark the point when the barriers that exist in the public imagination between what it means to be "able" and "disabled", Olympian and Paralympian, begin to be broken down for good. Pistorius, a natural-born athlete, also happens to be at the vanguard of evolution of amputee athletics. In the nine years between 2001 and 2010, 967 American servicemen and women lost at least one limb in the line of duty. Research into prosthetic limb technology has never been so well-resourced, or so advanced. Within his lifetime prosthetic limbs will improve until they surpass the athletic performance of their natural equivalents, then the "disabled" may be faster than the "abled". For the IAAF and the athletics community that, as the CAS has said, is "one of the challenges of 21st century life".
In this case, it might not be a clear advantage because the cons roughly outweigh the pros, but I can see this happening less and less in the future, as technology advances. Where do you draw the line between naturally gifted and well-trained and an unfair advantage?
Then there's genetic engineering, later on in the future. No doubt will they be able to also improve someone's athletic skill early on. Would this be considered cheating? How should the world of sports cope with this ever evolving technology which will soon surpass the human body.
