Does disabled athlete have advantage?
Posted: Monday, July 16, 2007 8:39 AM
Oscar Pistorius was born without shinbones. At the age of 11 months, his legs were amputated at the knee. Nineteen years later, running on high-tech carbon-fiber prosthetics, he’s fighting a battle to be allowed to attempt to qualify for the Olympics.
Seems straightforward, doesn’t it? If he can run as fast as able-bodied athletes, why not?
But the IAAF, track and field’s governing body, wants to ban Pistorius on the grounds not that he’s disadvantaged, but that his prosthetics give him an unfair advantage. Naturally enough, this has raised howls of protests from advocates for the disabled.
Let’s get one thing straight at the start: Pistorius is not disabled. He got a bad genetic break, but he says himself he can do anything anyone with the normal compliment of lower legs can do. He can, in fact, do more.
Pistorius isn't quite fast enough – yet – to qualify for the Olympics, but he runs 400 meters in 46 seconds and change and is fast enough in a sprint to beat the fastest women in the world. He’s 20 years old and a college student in his native South Africa. He just has to wear prosthetics to get around faster than 99 percent of the people on the planet.
Anyone with a heart has to say, “Let him run.” But it’s not as simple as that. What if, the IAAF is saying, his prosthetics give him an advantage that able-bodied runners don’t have? What if, in other words, the people with legs and feet are the ones who are disabled? What then? Do athletes start chopping their legs off in order to get the Pistorius pistons and win more races? (And you know that if the prosthetics are declared legal and really do give an advantage, there will be lines around the block waiting for amputations. That’s how it is with athletes.)
The problem is that the IAAF, which earlier this year banned mechanical devices like Pistorius’ prosthetics, then reversed that ruling, has no science to back up its feeling that Pistorius is somehow cheating. As Jere Longman points out in this New York Times piece, there are no definitive studies.
But there is one study by Robert Gailey, an associate professor of physical therapy at the University of Miami Medical School, who is quoted as saying, “Are they looking at not having an unfair advantage? Or are they discriminating because of the purity of the Olympics, because they don’t want to see a disabled man line up against an able-bodied man for fear that if the person who doesn’t have the perfect body wins, what does that say about the image of man?”
Gailey says that a natural leg returns more energy on each stride than do Pistorius’ prosthetics. The IAAF says the artificial legs give the runner an unnaturally long stride.
If the IAAF is right, then Pistorius shouldn’t be allowed to run in the Olympics. If it isn’t and research shows that he gets no advantage but is running at a disadvantage, then he should stay. But it’s got to be done on science, and that remains to be done.
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