Today, The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that double-amputee sprinter
Oscar Pistorius can try to get a place on the South African Olympic team.
The ruling overturns one from the International Association of Athletics Federations which said he could not compete with able-bodied runners.
Last year,
The New York Times asked, "Is he too disabled or too abled?"
The Times published a very useful interactive piece that shows why amputees might have an advantage in a sprint.
I suspect this story would be, as journos call it, "a talker." What do other athletes, especially athletes with disabilities, think? What other sports might this kind of ruling spread to, including professional golf where golf cart use has been an issue? I see this one as a milestone.
In a profile of Pistorius,
Time said:
When Oscar Pistorius' lower legs were amputated at age 1, few would have banked on this South African challenging world-class sprinters. At 20, when he began to close in on an Olympic-qualifying time for the 400 m, experts posited that his times were so good, he must have been getting an unfair advantage from his bladelike prosthetics. When he set his sights on the Olympic Games in Beijing, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ruled he couldn't compete against able-bodied athletes. An IAAF-initiated study found that more energy is returned to Pistorius' upper legs from his blades than from ankles and calf muscles and that he uses less oxygen.
Pistorius, 21, is appealing, on the basis of studies with differing results. It was only recently that living with prosthetic legs was seen as a huge impediment, but he has turned this perception upside down. He's on the cusp of a paradigm shift in which disability becomes ability, disadvantage becomes advantage. Yet we mustn't lose sight of what makes an athlete great. It's too easy to credit Pistorius' success to technology. Through birth or circumstance, some are given certain gifts, but it's what one does with those gifts, the hours devoted to training, the desire to be the best, that is at the true heart of a champion.
