Playing with Fire Podcast

Advantage Pistorious?

No, the title is not about an update from Wimbledon. Would you believe it is about a young man, Oscar Pistorious, running world-class 200 and 400 meter times with two lower leg prosthetics?

Josh McHugh wrote, “Pistorius was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1986, with five digits on each hand and two toes on each tiny foot. Each leg was missing its fibula, the long, thin bone that anchors the calf muscle and forms the outside of the ankle. His parents had a choice: consign their child to a wheelchair or amputate his lower legs and let him learn to walk with prosthetics.

His father, Henke, head of the family’s zinc-mining company, asked a dozen orthopedic surgeons which three doctors in the world they would choose to perform a lower-leg amputation on their own child. Of the top three they named, two were in the US and one was in South Africa. A month before Oscar’s first birthday, Gerry Versveld removed the baby boy’s legs halfway between his knees and ankles. Six months later, Oscar took his first steps, on a pair of fiberglass pegs. Fast forward to today.

A company called Flex-Foot debuted the Cheetah in 1996, but the prosthetic blades remained a bit crude until Flex-Foot was acquired by the Icelandic firm Ossur in 2000. If you are missing a leg, owning an Ossur is like driving a BMW M-series. The current Cheetahs look a little like the rear leg of a horse or cat, extending straight down from the socket, cantilevering backward, and then angling forward sharply. But last September, Pistorius and Brauckmann went to Reykjavik to test prototypes designed for double amputees. The new ones, which Pistorius hasn’t debuted at a major race yet, make just one smooth curve, an arc of pure engineering.

Perhaps more important, the limits of the human body — any human body — are a matter of math. It takes 3,556 joules to move 80.5 kilograms, Pistorius’ weight, at 9.4 meters per second. That’s his average speed on his fastest 200-meter run (21.58 seconds). Those joules have to come from somewhere. Running is basically a matter of forcing that power into the legs and using them, springlike, to bounce the body forward. The lower legs of able-bodied sprinters return all the energy pumped into them by the muscles at the hips and knees — and they give back more, thanks to power from the calves and ankles. Pistorius doesn’t have feet, ankles, or calves, of course, so he compensates: His strength trainer estimates that 85 percent of his power comes from his hips and the rest comes from the knees. That hip- generated stride, combined with the odd shape of the Cheetah itself, means that Pistorius has to waddle slightly, his feet flailing out to the side a bit on each rearward kick. The blades make that scissoring noise as they grip the track, compress, and return to their original shape.

Pistorius’ street legs are modeled and painted to look as much like natural legs as possible, color-matched to his thighs. But covered by the flesh-tone paint is a doodled-on depiction of calf muscle a friend inked in red and black permanent marker before the Athens Paralympics. It’s an interesting tattoo, a reminder that no matter how good Cheetahs are, Pistorius is still missing a natural calf.

So, sure, artificial legs are lighter than natural ones. Pistorius will never blow out his ankles or break a toe, though presumably his knees are as vulnerable as anyone’s to old age and trauma. But does any of that constitute an unfair advantage? Does being able to modify and tune a prosthetic limb belong to the same category as blood doping (banned) or altitude training (A-OK)? If there’s an issue of fairness here at all, it’s not that Pistorius is using technology superior to what evolution has built for human beings. As Robert Gailey, who studies the biomechanics of prosthetics at the University of Miami, puts it, running on stilts isn’t exactly a plus. The real asymmetry is that Frasure and Shirley each still have one natural leg, and it’s holding them back.

It’s also true that the Cheetahs Pistorius hopes to run on in Beijing, with their pure-engineering swoop, are in quantifiable ways better — faster — than the ones he ran on in Athens. Does that bother you? Pistorius’ handlers have a saying: If you think having carbon-fiber legs will make you a faster sprinter, have the operation and we’ll see you at the track. In their eyes, Cheetahs — for all their sophistication — are a disadvantage that Pistorius has transcended.
The International Association of Athletics Federations is supposed to decide if Pistorius is eligible for the Olympics this spring. The possibilities: If Pistorius is a black swan, a statistical freak who would have been a world-class sprinter on natural legs, too, then no problem — let him run. And, if being an amputee is what gave Pistorius something to prove and turned him into a world-class sprinter, then no problem — let him run. But if he is the vanguard of a legion of plastic track-and-field terminators whose upper speed is a function of materials science and software instead of determination and training? The International Olympics Commission better start hiring some engineers.”

Many critics are advocating the best way to approach the question of Oscar’s eligibility to compete in the Olympic Games is “guilty until proven innocent.” I think we should give someone who can run 400 meters on two prosthetics, in 46.56 seconds, the benefit of the doubt until it is proven the prosthetics provide an unfair advantage. Even then, I will still be in awe of a bilateral lower leg amputee who has the talent to balance and generate enough power to compete with the best able-bodied track athletes in the world. His courage, perseverance, and joy in pursuing an Olympic dream is inspiring and challenges all of us to reach higher. What feeble excuse can we possibly give for not pursuing our dreams?