This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Olympics, Track and Field. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Thanks to a new ruling today, double-amputee Oscar Pistorius can continue blazing a trail for disabled people… all the way to the Olympics.
If you’re not familiar with Oscar Pistorius, he’s a South African sprinter who had his legs amputated between the knees and ankles as a young child. Despite his setbacks, he competed in sports throughout his life and became a world-class athlete. Now he has more Paralympic gold medals than he knows what to do with, and he holds the world Paralympic records in the 100m, 200m, and 400m dashes.
Pistorius uses carbon-fiber blades in place of his feet, and some say this gives him an unfair advantage over able-bodied athletes. An earlier ruling by a lower sports arbitration court banned him from competing against able-bodied athletes, but today’s ruling sets the sky as the limit for Pistorius.
As prosthetic technology gets better, I imagine we’ll see future rulings that set limitations for what equipment disabled athletes can use in order to keep the playing field as level as possible. (Think of it as NASCAR meets track and field.) For now, whatever your opinion on this historic ruling, I think we can all agree that it’s fantastic that prosthetics have come far enough to create this situation.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:18 am
should Oscar pistorius http://oscar-pistorius.barerube.cn