UPDATE 29.08.2011: Yesterday, Oscar Pistorius qualified for the 400 semi finals at the athletics world championships in Daegu. A sport-court had decided that his artificial carbon legs do not give him an unfair advantage compared to other runners.
UPDATE 17.05.2008: A few hours ago the CAS (basically a court for sports) decided that the prosthetic-limbed runner Oscar Pitorious will to be allowed to start at the “normal” Olympics in Peking this year (and not the Paralympics), if he is able to qualify by beating the time of 45.95 seconds for 400 metres (his record is 46.56 seconds so far). As you can read below, the IAAF decided in January 2008 that he had unfair advantages over other athletes and therefor denied him access to the Olympics; Pistorius appealed the decision and won.
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Due to the massive number of doping reports in the last year, I had several discussions with friends about doping, drug-abuse and cyber-limbs in sports.
I think everyone would agree that tournaments (e.g. the Tour de France) should be as fair as possible in order to keep them interesting – which is one of the reasons why female do not compete versus male athletes (at least in disciplines where the body plays a key role), and which is one of the reasons why doping is not allowed in sports; you are not allowed to have an advantage over other athletes, because it makes the whole thing boring.
(Now, of course one could argue that sports per se isn’t fair, because Michael Jordan was born a better sportsman than me, but that’s just life I guess – on a statistical average, talking about sports worldwide here, we will find a bunch of athletes with the same physical conditions.)
A few days back Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee sprinter, has been denied a shot at the Olympics … for being too fast. The runner — who uses carbon-fiber, prosthetic feet — was reviewed by the International Association of Athletics Federations (or IAAF), a review which found the combination of man and machine to be too much for its purely human competitors. According to the IAAF report, the “mechanical advantage of the blade in relation to the healthy ankle joint of an able bodied athlete is higher than 30-percent.” Additionally, Pistorius uses 25-percent less energy than average runners due to the artificial limbs, therefore giving him an unfair advantage on the track… or so they say. Oscar is expected to appeal the decision, saying a lack of variables explored by the single scientific study calls for deeper investigation into the matter.
The IAAF rule 144.2 prohibits:
(e) 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.
For me, the question arises: why not just open a “free for all” category in sports? Why not allow people to take drugs and implant cyberlimbs?
From the point of law, people are allowed to harm their bodies (this was, by the way, a heavy argument against the ban on smoking), you cannot arrest someone for hitting himself on the head, cutting or harming himself in any other way (authorities may arrest people who endanger their own lives, but that’s an entirely other point here).
Ethically, there wouldn’t be much of a difference to trapping people on islands and making a movie out of it, seeing people with phobias being confronted with them on television, or having people take place in selection tournament for becoming a wife of a racist and chauvinist millionaire (who already has had 5 wives).
The main argument against it – and it weighs heavily – is the argument of children and choice; Russia and other countries (I’m not that much into sports history, just trying to make a point really) once had a reputation for heavily doping their sportsmen and sportswomen during childhood who lateron had massive advantages (until they reached the age of 25 and died), and one can expect the same to happen again if this “free for all” category would be implemented: young children, somewhere in third world countries, receiving implants and massive doping from the very early days on; in the (near) future one might even consider athletes getting bio-engineered for the purpose of being successfull in one specific discipline in their lives …
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