Oscar Pistorius: The Blade Runner

when I saw how white he was.

I may be going out on a limb here, but I tend to side against letting athletes with prosthetics compete. The use of modern composite materials could certainly give supposedly handicapped athletes a leg up. It just seems wise to cut the threat of performance enhancement off at the knees.

On the other hand, I haven’t had to walk a mile in Pastorious’s shoes. If the shoe was on the other foot, I might think differently.

It seems to me that, in effect, Pistorius with his racing limbs on basically constitutes a human-powered locomotive machine. Like a bicycle. While Pistorius’s limbs may arguably only provide a slight advantage at this point in their technological development, I’m sure in time artificial limbs will be capable of providing distinct advantages. (Or maybe they already are; I guess I don’t keep up with biomechanical technology as well I should have.)

Maybe there’s a middle ground. Something similar to performance restrictions placed on stock cars. As long as the performance of the artificial limb is restricted to certain mechanical limits, a user can race against naturally-limbed humans.

I think we celebrate elite athletes - particularly those in Olympic sports - because they are the best of us (at least with respect to physical achievement, though most can be held up as paragons of hard work and dedication as well). Whether through rational thought or subconscious process, I think the majority of people define the ‘of us’ element as being totally comprised of elements that COULD naturally occur for any of us. Obviously, the necessary elements to be an Olympic athlete DON’T occur for the vast majority of us - no amount of dedication can make someone a world-class athlete in almost any sport if they haven’t done pretty damn well in the genetic lottery - but I think it’s important to us that they COULD. Most of us tend to think of reasonably functional eyesight as a table stake - bringing someone who had the misfortune to be born with 20/200 vision up to a ‘normal’ functionality seems like it’s correcting an unfairness rather than propagating one. Using PEDs, on the other hand, would alter a person and give him or her an advantage that none ‘of us’ could naturally replicate (obviously painting with a broad brush here, as injections of naturally occurring things like testosterone or blood doping with your own blood tend to fall into the PED umbrella).

In the middle of this spectrum - between sci/tech correcting an ‘unfair’ naturally occurring disadvantage and conveying an ‘unfair’ unnatural advantage - seems to lie the case of Pistorius. I think for many people, there is just too much ‘otherness’ in Pistorius’ artificial appendages to make us truly accept that he’s doing what he’s doing as ‘one of us’ in the physical sense, even if we celebrate the character and dedication that have allowed him to do what he’s done. The science that quantifies the advantage they lend him seems to reinforce that instinct in this case.

With respect to performance enhancement, I think there’s also an interesting distinction between individual and team sports - we lionize excellence in both, but our desire for purity in team sports can easily be suborned by the affiliations (regional, educational, etc.) that tend to align us with a certain team. It doesn’t take a ton of critical thinking to realize that some forms of PEDs are probably pretty damn prevalent in the NFL. As a Cowboys fan, I never seem to care that certain players are bigger/faster than they perhaps should be. When I do bother to consider or rationalize the idea, it tends to boil down to A) I have no evidence that the Cowboys are any more roided up than any other team, and B) who cares, dammit - we have to beat the damned Eagles! Team sports fandom seems to have less in common with celebrating human achievement and more in common with celebrating victory in war - and we’re obviously very cool with using technology to win wars. Unless you just got hit by a Predator drone, in which case you’re probably pretty down on the whole idea.

However…

but our desire for purity in team sports can easily be suborned by the affiliations (regional, educational, etc.) that tend to align us with a certain team.

I don’t think individual sports is much different, particularly when that athlete assumes greater meaning for some cause or nationality. See Manny Pacquaio or Lance Armstrong.

…of determining exactly what events are considered an “athletic sport”. My working definition to this point is

“An athletic sport is a competition in which players gain an advantage through precise and/or intense physical activity using, at most, a simple machine as equipment to facilitate performance.”

There is some nuance, here: Football is an athletic sport in spite of the arguably complex machinery employed in safety gear because the gear is designed for safety, not to improve performance (yes, you can hit harder for longer with shoulder pads on than without, but if you weren’t concerned with safety or pain, that probably wouldn’t be true). For examples, I say NASCAR and Air Racing are not athletic sports, but golf, shuffleboard, and the pole vault are. There are some fringe cases which probably require some additional clarification (for example, I believe this would make longbow archery an athletic sport but compound-bow archery not), but I think this is a good start.

So from my perspective, I find it interesting to note that this fellow’s legs are simple levers or springs. I don’t think it would be too much to allow intact runners to wear carbon fiber blades instead of shoes. Yes, it would require years of retraining to take full advantage, but the same could be said of the transition to modern rackets in tennis, or of the introduction of the dimpled golf ball.

What I’m trying to say is, we let these runners wear fancy shoes already, why not let them wear what they like on their feet so long as it is a single simple machine (lever or spring, for example)? You can rule out wheels because we have skating for that. Imagine the field running with small carbon-fiber blades slipped under their feet with a few inches of clearance. Would that be so different than watching them run around with carbon fiber encasing their feet and attaching them to specially designed soles?

Maybe the closest analogy would be with technological advances with equipment. E.g. those sharkskin swimsuits awhile back, or the advances that are made in ski technology, bikes, rackets, etc.. In each case, reduced friction, weight, etc leads to better performance, breaking previous records. If we wanted only to see the athletic excellence
(rather than combined with technological excellence), we’d have to follow the ancient model of exercising naked, but even then, there’s all the training advances, state sponsored sports factories, etc, so it’s still not just the individual effort we’re seeing.

I guess in this case versus the other equipment issues, the justification is that the equipment is being used by “normal” (athletically freakish) bodies rather than replacing the bodies outright as in the carbon blade case. Still, it’s a very tricky line.

I’d like to see a no-holds barred Olympics—any drugs, tech, etc is open, just to see what humans can do—and then a natural Olympics barring any performance enhancers…but the point of this post is that it’s difficult if not impossible to make a clean split between these alternatives.

This is a very complex issue with great arguments available for both sides, which means it probably won’t be resolved any time soon unless the Olympics administration decide they somehow know the correct answer unequivocally and put their foot down with a ruling one way or the other. They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t, though, because there will be an outcry from the losing side whatever is decided.

If there were an accurate way to measure energy expenditure during a controlled race between Pistorious and an olympic sprinter who will finish the race in a similar time and with a similar body mass (correcting for the differential in leg mass) with some sort of calorimeter in the form of a suit, that would probably be the best way to determine whether he receives a significant advantage. In sprinting, the runner who is able to most efficiently convert energy into work in the forward direction is going to win. If Pistorious expends significantly less energy than the other sprinter, you can determine that he has a significant advantage. Of course, even then, there will be those who feel sympathetic toward his plight and say let him compete anyway.

He would need to compete with others who have a similar disability and similar prosthetics for it to be fair.

Would it be entertaining to race a wheelchair-bound athlete versus an intact-limb competitor on a two mile downhill race on pavement? Would it be competitive to rerun the same race but on a rocky surface?

For a sport or a race to have merit there has to be a level-playing field, pardon the phrase. Just think of all of the different weight classes in boxing, for example.

Is that the mechanical correction is core to the competition. Vision is required in virtually every sport (maybe not… I don’t know, arm wrestling?), but its ancillary to other qualities in sports. If there were a straight vision competition - who could see the smallest letters on an eye chart from 50 feet - there’s no way they would allow corrective eye surgery. Just as nobody would allow Dwight Howard to have 7-foot long robo-arms replace his natural 6-foot long arms. If a football player has a kidney removed, yeah he got a pound or two lighter, but that’s not directly, appreciably enhancing the skills he uses to play football, so that is alright. Similarly, if Pistorius were competing in archery or car racing, nobody would have any problem with his prosthetic legs.

It’s still a very subjective issue with plenty of gray area though. I don’t who makes the distinction or how.

A movie ahead of its time—-obviously. Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Edward James Olmos, Sean Young, M. Emmett Walsh. Good stuff!

Another blade runner