For those of you who don’t know, The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune are sister publications, owned by the same company. So, when I saw a link over at Trust But Verify to a column by George Vescey on the IHT’s web site, I figured it must have been published over at on the Times’ website, too. And in the print edition, which I get every morning (though I rarely get to read as much of the paper as I’d like).
Vescey’s column had to do with Oscar Pistorius and his challenge of an IAAF rule that effectively banned him from competing against able-bodied athletes due to his use of Cheetah prosthetics. The backstory you need to know about Pistorius’ situation is that this rule was enacted last summer after the same IAAF had allowed the 21-year-old South African to compete at several events for able-bodied athletes. Why the turnaround? Because someone, somewhere thought that the Cheetahs give Pistorius an advantage. (Ask any “normal” sprinter whether he or she would willingly undergo a double-amputation to gain said “advantage” and I’m sure you’re likely to get a resounding “no f*&#ing way” once the full impact of such a choice sank in.)
OK, so that’s the backstory. Vescey, in his column, seemed to have his own “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment, as he wrote this:
Oscar Pistorius of South Africa is almost sure to be denied in his bid to run in the 2008 Summer Games with two artificial lower legs. Pistorius’s problem is that his prosthetic devices are far beyond the contour and function of so-called normal legs.
Pistorius, 21, who was born without the fibula in his lower legs and with other defects in his feet, uses carbon-fiber devices, known as Cheetahs, shaped like the letter J. He is the first amputee athlete to demonstrate the decimal points of a possible Olympic medalist.
Interestingly, on Friday the Court of Arbitration for Sport voided the IAAF’s decision to ban Pistorius from “regular” track meets. But there was something about the article that rang hollow, and it was this statement in the following paragraph:
The I.A.A.F. was planning to release its decision Thursday, but has delayed it until Saturday to give Pistorius a chance to respond.
Wait just a minute. The IAAF decision? Didn’t that happen in January? But the article on the IHT web site says it was published on May 16 (as in, yesterday). So what’s going on?
Before getting to that, another thing you need to know is that the CAS sent out a press release on Thursday afternoon letting the media know that their decision would be announced the following day at 3 p.m. Swiss time (9 a.m. in New York). So did Vescey just toss off another column without checking his facts (again?)? Well, not in this case (although there is a correction appended to the original article).
Turns out, after a bit of digging around on the Times’ web site, I discovered that the article originally appeared in The New York Times in January. (January 10th, to be precise.) So how did this article turn up on the IHT web site yesterday? Interesting question. Especially because the result turned out to be exactly the opposite of what Vescey appeared to be prognosticating.
My hunch is that some editor at the IHT saw that they already had a column about Pistorius “in the can” and decided to publish it without reading what it said. Or if the editor who chose the column did read it in advance, he or she figured that Vescey was probably right. After all, how often do athletes win in these sorts of cases?
In this case, that choice turned out to be wrong. By picking up an old column, whoever decided to publish it splattered egg (or something else) over the newspaper’s reputation. At least a little bit for people who are even occasionally following the Pistorius story. Someone should have done a bit more fact-checking before publishing the story four months after it had originally appeared. Can you say “oops”?
In today’s edition of The New York Times, by contrast, there was a front-page article on the Pistorius decision. That article at least got most of the facts right, although they made a pretty big error in how they presented part of the story. The CAS’ decision was clearly written to apply only to Pistorius and only to the Cheetah prosthetics he uses at this time. In the early paragraphs of the article, the writers make it sound like yesterday’s ruling may be a watershed moment in sports history.
It may, but only if future athletes in Pistorius’ position have to fight the IAAF over whether or not they can compete amongst their “able-bodied” compatriots. But the way the decision is written, future panels are pretty much free to ignore this current ruling. So it may not be a watershed moment, either. The only way to know is to see how this plays out over time. And we don’t know how soon it will be before another athlete comes along in the same situation as Oscar Pistorius. But if others in the future are given the same privilege, this decision will have been the one that broke the ground for them.
Getting back to George Vescey, he concluded his column by saying:
By the same token, one of these days, a runner with a prosthetic leg or foot may challenge to run in the Olympics. In the meantime, there should be a way to infuse Oscar Pistorius’s spirit into all of us, within Olympic rules, of course.
Well, according to the CAS, Pistorius isn’t violating any rules.
Good luck to Oscar Pistorius as he now attempts to qualify for the Beijing games. It would be quite a sight to see him charging towards the finish line in the Olympics, no matter where he ends up finishing in the race.
From what I have read about this particular OP affair, it seems that the IAAF conducted some tests prior to their banning of Pistorius. CAS reveiwed the tests and found them deficient. In particular, CAS referrences the fact that the tests as conducted only looked at top speed and did not look into what affect the Cheetahs had on starting and accelerating. It is possible that, even if the Cheetahs give some benefit on top end speed, they lack some ability in starting and accelerating, CAS seems to have reasoned, and hence you can’t ban them.
While Pistorius seems to be competitive, there is not evidence of overwhelming dominance. How good he could have done had he been born with normal legs is impossible to say. I suppose one might conduct physiological tests and extrapolate the results, but that does not factor into account whatever effect his desire to “prove” himself had. Perhaps he he been “blessed” with normal legs, he might have become a couch potato instead of an athlete.
William,
That’s exactly it. The study didn’t see if there was an overall advantage throughout the course of a race, just that there may be an advantage once Pistorius (or any other athlete using Cheetahs) attained top speed. From what I gathered reading the CAS ruling, and from other sources, the Cheetahs offer no advantage at the start, and given the body mechanics involved, may actually be a disadvantage in that portion of the race. What I got from the CAS ruling was that overall, there is no (currently) demonstrated advantage to using them.
And although Pistorius has been competitive in the few races he’s done against able-bodied athletes, his results fail to convince me that he has an overwhelming advantage. If he did, he’d have been blowing the competition away.
Pistorius’s case isn’t so easy as it appears. He has a disadvantage at the start, yes, but the Cheetahs are far superior to human limbs at speed. They’re super-light and they propel him forward at the “heel” without any muscle contraction on his part (because he has no muscle there obviously).
The fact that he’s not dominating is somewhat moot. Maybe he’s just not a good enough athlete to take full advantage of them? And if he did longer events like the 800m, he might well dominate since the Cheetahs do so much of the work for him. He’s the only sprinter that speeds up in the second half of the 400m.
While it is certainly a compelling, cheer-for-the-underdog kind of story, in the long run, letting mechanically assisted athletes compete with non-assisted athletes may be a precedent that will be regretted. By the way, I’m basically summarizing the arguments made on http://scienceofsport.blogspot.com/ . Interesting reading.
Thom,
You make some interesting points. I’ll have to take a look over at the article you’ve linked to. In the way the CAS ruled on the Pistorius case, the panel made it clear that their decision only applies to Pistorius and the particulars of his case. In a different situation, where the elements clearly favored the athlete using Cheetahs or some other device, they left themselves, and any future panels who might have to decide, plenty of wiggle room.
So it seems to me that when mechanically-assisted athletes do compete with non-assisted athletes in the future, it will only be allowed in situations where the evidence suggests that it’s a fair matchup. If you’re interested, you can read the panel’s decision here.
Rant wrote: “it will only be allowed in situations where the evidence suggests that it’s a fair matchup”
That’s nearly impossible Rant. At the highest levels, athletes win and lives by fractions of a percent of their abilities. There’s no scientific or engineering analysis of this situation that would be accurate to that degree, and account for the many variables.
I suppose you could give some kind of fitness test, and check his VO2 max and anaerobic threshold and fat-burning potential and overall efficiency and things like that. But still, while these things are considered “good” predictors of performance, they’re good in that there is a correlation, not that the guy with the biggest VO2 max wins 100% of the time. So this sort of thing would only be useful if it turned out that Pistorius was in horrible shape.
All we can really do is try it and see. Fast forward 20 years, and if there’s a bunch of footless track stars, then we can have a good guess. If I were the sports, that’s exactly what I would do – allow the competition, but be prepared for a split down the line, and be prepared to do it retroactively.
tom
Tom,
Point taken. The CAS decision for Pistorius makes clear that each situation should be addressed on a a case by case basis. Whether there’s a fair matchup between individuals may well be impossible to determine.