Amputee Athletes, Heros or Cheats?

The Boston Globe wrote an excellent article about the controversy surrounding competition between amputee athletes and able-bodied athletes.  I've put some excerpts from the article below.  What do you think?

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When amputee athletes compete against able-bodied athletes, they're called courageous. But when they nearly win, as a South African sprinter did earlier this year while trying to qualify for that country's Olympic team, they are accused of cheating. It's a hypocrisy that doesn't sit well with MIT professor and double amputee Hugh Herr.

Inside his biomechatronics lab - devoted to the intersection of biology, mechanics, and electronics - experimental prostheses lie on a table, a collection of metal parts and circuitry engineered to mimic human muscles and tendons. The professor's goal is to one day reach the point where artificial limbs improve upon human design, but he insists that he and his fellow scientists haven't reached that point yet.

That belief is why he became so intrigued by claims that carbon-fiber "Cheetah" Flex-Foot prostheses gave a competitive advantage to South African sprinter and double amputee Oscar Pistorius. In January, the IAAF - the international governing body of track and field - ruled that the Cheetah's springy, J-shaped blade gave Pistorius an unfair advantage over able-bodied athletes by allowing him to use less energy as he ran. It then banned him from the Olympics.

Pistorius planned an appeal, and his legal team contacted Herr, hoping the MIT professor could assess the IAAF claim. For two weeks spread over February and March, Herr and a team of experts in biomechanics and physiology performed tests on Pistorius at Rice University in Houston. The tests done in that school's locomotion laboratory showed that the Cheetahs did not enable the double amputee to conserve energy or provide a mechanical advantage when sprinting. When Herr presented the team's findings before the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland last month, it reversed the IAAF ban, clearing the way for Pistorius to compete at the Beijing Olympics in August if he qualifies for his country's team.

"One thing we're fighting against is pop culture and Hollywood," says Herr. "People believe things exist that don't. I believe one day technology will go beyond what's capable with human legs. But the Cheetah ain't it. There has never been a prosthesis developed that's been shown to decrease energy requirements to walk or run."

For Herr, it was a scientific and a personal victory. Twenty years ago, he was accused of cheating in competitive rock climbing; he had competed wearing prosthetic legs he had designed for the sport. "With Oscar, it was like, 'Here we go again,' " says Herr, 43. He is bemused by the fact that when amputees run or climb more slowly than "intact-leg competitors," their athletic displays are considered courageous. But as soon as amputees prove they can actually compete with able-bodied athletes, accusations of cheating follow, he says.

(go to boston.com for the rest of the story...)