General Comment
General Comment
Cavalier said:
If races are run "to find the fastest human," then any augmentation should be allowed up to an including the use of a jet propelled car.
Acknowledging the larger consideration in the quoted post, I'm isolating this part in order to reframe the general question of the thread.
I wish I could remember which particular enterprise it was (
AD Police Files, maybe; I cannot be certain), but back in the '90s, when I first started noticing anime, I remember being really high and trying to reconcile a filler scene in which a couple of high school girls were having a fluff vanity conversation:
What cybernetics do you want to get?
It struck me as a profoundly odd consideration. Indeed, those who have witnessed my occasional assertion that whatever we willfully do to ourselves as a species still counts as selection and evolution might also recall that I track the underlying philosophical inquiry to that scene.
For the current discussion, though, I would pose a simple enough question:
If Oscar Pistorius has an "advantage", who wants to replace their lower legs with what he's got?
My point being that people who want to
run fast probably aren't going to be lining up to have their legs amputated at the knee so that they can get the latest prosthetics.
• • •
There is also a larger question here. The question of "disability" in sports is a long controversy. Should a deaf person be afforded a different starting mechanism for a swim meet? Well, frankly,
any swimmer can respond to the strobe
light instead of the starting sound. However, the competitive swimming community
did have the discussion about that at one time.
But that's a pretty simple one; it's not like the deaf person is getting something special that nobody else is allowed to use.
The PGA dove into its own controversy in the 1990s, and that discussion has come full circle. In June, Casey Martin took to the course at the Olympic Club to compete in the U.S. Open golf tournament. It was his first PGA competition in fourteen years. Back in the 1990s, Martin and the PGA tangled their way into the Supreme Court of the United States to argue about whether or not a golfer with a legitimate medical handicap should be allowed to use a cart in a professional golf tournament. Opponents said the cart would give Martin an unfair advantage, as part of golf is the labor of walking the course. Martin's supporters questioned whether walking was so vital that someone with a good enough swing should be excluded. The point about walking the course found much sympathy among everyday duffers, though pro golfers do not carry their own clubs—they have a caddy to do that for them.
In 1998, the U.S. Open came to the Olympic Club. It was Martin's best finish as a professional golfer; he placed twenty-third. In the 2012 Open, Martin shot four over on the first round, and five over for the second. His 149 missed the cut for round three by one stroke.
The cart, it seems, wasn't so much of an advantage.
Oscar Pistorius is another chapter in a long-running discussion that has no firm answer. In the end, he won a chance, and made a hell of a run. It is something to be proud of, for Pistorius, South Africa, the International Olympic Committee, and track and field in general. Is there a moral to the story? Not really; Oscar Pistorius running in the Olympics did not answer the deeper question of disability in sports—rather, his participation added to the data set, and we have a long way to go before any definitive conclusion can be asserted.