Fastest man on no legs
April 07 2007 at 12:19PM
On the face of it, Oscar Pistorius’s achievement in finishing second in the 400m race at the South African athletics championships in March was a respectable one.
His time of 46.56 seconds was not far off the lower qualifying time for 2007’s World Championships, and given that he is only 20, it puts him within realistic range of competing at next year’s Olympics in Beijing.
But Pistorius’s performance assumes astonishing proportions in the light of one additional fact: at the age of one, he had both legs amputated below the knee.
Running on a pair of hi-tech, carbon-fibre prosthetics known as Cheetahs, which have blades rather than feet at their tip, this business student from Pretoria University is blurring the sporting line between the able-bodied and the disabled - not that he has ever cared for the latter phrase.
Having raced against, and beaten, able-bodied opponents for the past two years, Pistorius’s aspiration is clear. He intends to become the first to bridge the gap between the Paralympics - where he won gold in 2004 - and the Olympics.
But that ambition looks likely to be frustrated by the imminent introduction of a rule forbidding him to compete with able-bodied opponents. This young man, it seems, has risen too high, too fast and his unbridled progress has alarmed many within the sporting establishment, with criticism centring upon the unusual means by which he manages to transport himself.
Marlon Shirley, the American single amputee whom Pistorius defeated over 400m at the Athens Paralympics, complained afterwards that his rival had an unfair “locomotive advantage” with the contraptions fashioned by a team of Icelandic engineers.
Able-bodied runners, too, may feel threatened by the perceived advantages of the Cheetahs. Some say they are too long, making Pistorius taller than he would naturally be had he not been born without crucial bones in his lower legs. Others say the blades, which afford him the obvious nickname of Blade Runner, are longer than they need to be and provide him with excess spring.
His parents, Henke, a zinc mine owner, and Sheila, chose to have the lower limbs amputated and replaced so he could walk rather than seeing him in a wheelchair for life.
Pistorius dismisses the debate.
At school he became an accomplished water polo and rugby player, but his ambitions within contact sport were curtailed by a serious knee injury at the age of 14. He decided to make athletics his speciality and vowed almost immediately to reach the Olympic Games.
Pistorius now has a high profile, which has brought him widespread commercial backing. His sponsored black sports car - a five-speed Seat Ibiza - contains no extra features for a disabled driver.
So potent is the Pistorius mission it has attracted the attention of Tom Hanks, who is bidding for rights to his story.
“People ask me all the time if I wish I had the rest of my legs,” Pistorius says. “No. I guess it’s a kind of an inconvenience, having to put on different legs to do different things, but there’s nothing anyone else can do that I can’t.”
But the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) may be about to disabuse him of that notion. Indications are that his continuing presence within able-bodied competition will come to an end with the introduction of a rule banning the use of any artificial means of running.
That no such rule exists is a testament to Pistorius’s extraordinary drive. Before now, it has simply not been needed. But already the IAAF has considered the matter within its technical, medical and legal committees, and it is likely that the Cheetahs, or anything similar, will be ruled illegal for able-bodied competition at the federation’s congress at the World Championships in Japan in August. Such has been the young man’s progress that he has improved his time by four seconds since 2004.
The news that the IAAF could move against Pistorius came as no great surprise to Tanni Grey-Thompson, the multiple Paralympic champion, who retired earlier this year and who retains a hard-boiled attitude to the political manoeuvrings she has spent a sporting lifetime observing.
“I have been expecting him to be banned,” she said. "When he was running less quickly, it was all quite jolly, but as soon as he started running fast times, that’s it. I think this has provoked a debate about what it is to be disabled, and what it is to be able-bodied.
"I think there’s an argument both ways. People will say he can pick the length and style of his prosthetics, so maybe that gives him an unfair advantage. I think it’s probably more of a disadvantage to be running with two lower limbs missing. Oscar is a stunning talent. He is as far ahead of his Paralympic rivals as Michael Johnson was over his Olympic 400m competitors 10 years ago. He has been given a glimpse of inclusion, but now it looks like being taken away from him.
“The authorities probably shouldn’t have let him compete against able-bodied athletes in the first place. They’ve given him a chance to get out of the ghetto, but they are going to throw him back in again.”
Grey-Thompson, conceding that there is logic in the likely IAAF position, adds: “But I’d like to see some well-researched evidence that the prosthetics give Oscar an unfair advantage rather than for the decision to be taken because of fear of disability. The IAAF has to take the lead and if there was scientific evidence, it would be a fair cop, really. But I would be unhappy if it was just a reaction to the fact that Oscar is running some very fast times - Is Oscar being disadvantaged for being good? Probably.”
Richard Callicott, a director of the British Paralympic Association, shares Grey-Thompson’s position.
“There’s no doubt Pistorius is a prodigious talent who trains very hard,” he said. "But there is an ethical question to do with the size and nature of the prosthetics he uses.
Some people are quite outraged about the fact that there is a possibility they could be competing at the Olympics against a disabled athlete. They regard him as having an unfair advantage. There is a sweet irony that someone with no legs should be considered by able-bodied rivals to be competing unfairly.
“Having Pistorius in the games would put able-bodied athletes in an impossible position if they felt he was racing with an unfair advantage. If they complained, people would say they were whingeing. I don’t think they could win, whatever they did.”
The likely IAAF position would still allow the possibility of disabled athletes moving into Olympic contention, but that possibility would only be open to runners such as Britain’s Paralympic champion Danny Crates, who lost an arm in a motorbike accident. In other words, to those who compete with no mechanical artifice. - Foreign Service
This article was originally published on page 27 of The Independent on Saturday on April 07, 2007