The Paralympics as the main competition of the future
This Guardian article talks about Oscar Pistorius, a Paralympic sprinter with speeds that would currently place him 8th-fastest among able-bodied sprinters in Britain. He runs with Össur custom sprint feet (pictured). He’s asking to be allowed to compete in the Olympics, and there’s some debate over whether the feet constitute an unfair advantage. But I think the more interesting question is: As prosthetic technology improves, will we start seeing the best times coming from the Paralympics instead of the Olympics? Is it not at least theoretically possible that we could design a better sprinting leg than the human leg?
The article immediately reminded me of a great makes-you-think hidden detail from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a sci-fi story where many of the characters are cybernetically enhanced, having had various muscles and joints replaced with stronger artificial ones:
One of these characters mentions he’s a former boxing medallist; but if you look closely, you discover that his medal is a Paralympic one. It took me a few moments to work this out (”but he isn’t disabled!”): One possible future for the Paralympics is as the competition where humans with elective (and superior) prosthetics are allowed to compete; in such a scenario, they could become the most interesting competition, with the Olympics relegated to special-interest for the purists…
July 13th, 2007 at 8:20 am
This has been happening with winter sports for a little while longer: specifically, amputee skiing involves a single huge fat ski and a seat you sit on (you face along the ski, not across it like on a snowboard, so the motion is more skiing than boarding). It’s quite fast although not yet as fast as able-bodied skiiers.
Wheelchair marathons are also considerably faster than able-bodied marathons; fairly intuitive in fact.
People have wondered whether this would happen with drugs too: would there be the “chemical assistance” Olympics with the best times and then one for purists? It hasn’t yet.
I guess the Paralympics thing might be a bit more plausible… but prosthetics don’t seem like they’ll be so good anytime soon that people will willingly have their limbs replaced with them (if nothing else, general purpose artificial limbs are still way behind ours, and phantom pain is practically a disability of its own), so the pool will continue to be limited to people who happen to have a limb removed for medical reasons or to be missing one from birth. I would think that by and large this limits the interest somewhat: both because the pool of people who are missing a limb and happen to be talented athletes is smaller than the able-bodied pool, and also because of both the stigma of disability and the lack of the “that could be me… if I could jump higher” factor.
July 13th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Thanks for your comment, Mary! I didn’t know that about wheelchair marathons - interesting.
As for the pool continuing to be limited to people missing limbs for unavoidable reasons: I agree, certainly for the near future; but I wonder if the rules of the Paralympics specifically disallow body modifications which are aesthetic/voluntary? If you did go so far as to have a limb removed, you’d be genuinely as disabled as someone who lost a limb for some other reason - and yet I can see the organisers wanting to take steps to discourage that sort of thing.
July 14th, 2007 at 7:59 am
I suppose there might also be the notion of winning by world record split eventually come into play. At the last Commonwealth Games they had two Elite Athletes With a Disability events for swimmers, but as all the swimmers were in different disability classes (the blind swimmer, for example, who couldn’t hold a line in his lane was slower than the swimmers missing part of their arm), so the gold medallist was the person who had the lowest time adjusted for the world record in that class. (In fact, two set world records for their class in the event.)
There’s already some minor ‘disability adjustment’ that seems to happen: swimmers in the totally blind class actually wear opaque goggles, which I think allows people who aren’t quite totally blind to compete.
I think able-bodied people have played wheelchair basketball, but wheelchair basketball is about as ferocious as ice-hockey, and people who have the upper body strength that permanent wheelchair users do have an advantage.