Do Disabled Athletes Have an Edge?

Oscar Pistorius of South Africa wins the 200m T44 for Men at the Athens 2004 Paralympic Games on September 21, 2004 at the Olympic Stadium in Athens, Greece.

Phil Cole / Getty

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A growing number of handicapped athletes these days are trying to break down the walls that keep them out of traditional sporting events, but none are capturing more attention, and generating more controversy, than Oscar Pistorius. The 20-year-old double below-knee amputee from South Africa has whittled his times in the 200- and 400-meter races so close to elite, able-bodied levels that many people speculate that he will not only run in the Paralympic Games but might even compete in next summer's Olympic Games in Beijing as well.

In recent weeks, newspaper headlines around the world have decried the news that the ruling body of international track and field, the IAAF, has banned Pistorius from formal competition on the basis that his prosthetic lower legs are "technical aids" and therefore illegal. In fact, the IAAF has yet to make a final ruling in regard to Pistorius and won't for a while, at least until the IAAF Congress, which takes place in Osaka, Japan, in late August, prior to the World Championships. "We did not legislate against his specific device because we haven't looked at his specific legs," says New York based IAAF Council Member Robert Hersh. "No conclusion has been made in his situation."

That doesn't mean that Pistorius has the green light to compete, just that he and his high-tech carbon-fiber feet have yet to pass muster with the technical committee that will decide if they provide him with an unfair advantage or simply the chance to compete on an even keel. "I think it is fair to say he will be allowed to compete until such time as a determination can be made," says IAAF Communications Director Nick Davies.

The debate stems from an amendment to the IAAF Council rules that was approved in March, prohibiting the "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."

"Oscar is pushing the limits from both a technological and physiological perspective," says Brian Frasure, the American sprinter who finished ahead of Pistorius in the 100-meter final and third in the 200 at the Athens Paralympics. Oddly enough, Frasure was also the prosthetist who fit Pistorius with his first high-tech running legs, while the winner of the Athens 100, American Marlon Shirley, helped design the carbon fiber blades called Cheetahs.

Pistorius, who was born with a congenital condition of no fibula bones in his legs and had both feet amputated when he was 11 months old, is already a lock for the Paralympic Games again. In Athens three years ago, he shocked the Paralympic field by making up a huge deficit to pass Shirley and Frasure on his way to gold in the 200-meter final.

Even though his times have dropped remarkably, Pistorius still hasn't run under any of the qualifying times for Olympic competition. In South Africa's able-bodied National Championships last March, he came in a fleet second place in the 400m in 46.56 seconds, almost three seconds off the winning time in Athens Olympics and a second off the international "A" qualifying standard of 45.55. It's not out of the question that such a young athlete could improve enough to make up that time. But for now Pistorius's best chance would be as part of the 4 x 400 relay team, assuming South Africa can qualify.

But the current debate isn't only about Olympic aspirations. All that 18-year-old Tatyana McFadden wants is to run alongside her teammates on the Atholton High School in Columbia, Maryland. Already an international phenom, having won silver and bronze medals for her country at the 2004 Athens Paralympic Games, McFadden had set her sights on something far more personal — competing for her high school, with her friends, on the track at the same time.

Though on the same track with able-bodied competitors, some of whom she would lap on longer distances, McFadden is able to win a point for her team only by beating a national standard for wheelchair racers. When spurned by Howard County officials, McFadden went to court and won the right to compete, telling the Baltimore Sun, "This is important to me because I wanted to get the same thrill and the same experience as all the other high school students. There's no competition by myself. It was lonely and embarrassing, and I just didn't like it. Other competitors would come up to me and they would say, `Good race,' but it wasn't really a good race because I was running by myself."

Like McFadden, Mallerie Badgett, an Alabama high school wheelchair athlete, wanted to race alongside her track team instead of in a separate wheelchair division set up by the Alabama High School Athletic Association. Supported by the American Association of Adapted Sports Programs (AAASP), the U.S. District Court ruled last May that "to the extent the defendants were required to extend a reasonable modification to Miss Badgett, they have met their obligation by establishing the separate wheelchair division for track and field."

Though such standoffs are relatively rare, they are only going to become more common. On the AAASP website, the organization's executive director Bev Vaughn noted, "The demand by student athletes across the country to participate in interscholastic sports will only continue to grow over the next decade. School systems across the country need to be prepared to meet that demand."

Pistorius wouldn't actually be the first Paralympian to compete in the Olympics. The USA's Marla Runyon, legally blind from degenerative Stargardt's disease, moved from the pentathlon (similar to the Olympic heptathlon) at the 1996 Atlanta Paralympics to running the Olympic 1500 and 5000 meters in Sydney and Athens. Paola Fantato represented Italy from her wheelchair in both 1996 Olympic and Paralympic archery events, something New Zealand's Neroli Fairhall was scheduled to do in 1980 before the Moscow games boycott. She became the first Olympic archer to compete from a wheelchair at Los Angeles in 1984. Eighty years earlier, American gymnast George Eyser won six medals, three of them gold, with a wooden left leg at the 1904 St. Louis Olympic Games.

And while Pistorius could become the first amputee to qualify for an Olympic track event, he probably won't be the last to give it a try. With more and more soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with disabling injuries and high-tech fixes, the population of disabled American athletes is growing at a faster rate than anytime since the Vietnam war. One soldier, U.S. Army Specialist James Stuck, who lost his right leg below the knee to a roadside bomb in Iraq only 18 months ago, was recently named to the U.S. Sitting Volleyball Team for the Paralympic Pan American Games in Brazil this August.

All of this means that just as the athletics establishment over the years has had to redefine its understanding of what minority and female athletes could do — women weren't allowed to run Olympic distances longer than 1500 meters until 1984, when the marathon and short-lived 3000 meter event were introduced at the Los Angeles games — it will now have to reassess the ability rather than disability of another group of athletes.

First and foremost, it will have to fully understand that these athletes don't compete with the sole objective of inspiring others. At a national meet prior to the Atlanta Paralympic Games, Shawn Brown, a single leg amputee who had just set a new record in the discus throw, was asked for an interview by a Sports Illustrated writer. His reply, "Is this going to be a sports story? I don't do human interest." Rather, like Pistorius, McFadden and virtually every athlete on the planet, what they do is just compete, and try to win.