In a landmark ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, South African athlete Oscar Pistorius – nicknamed ‘Bladerunner’ after the carbon-fibre prosthetics he uses in place of his amputated lower legs – has won the right to compete against able-bodied athletes, and plans to represent his country at either the Beijing Olympics or the later London event. [image taken from linked article]
From a purely technological perspective, it’s fantastic that we can replace a man’s missing limbs and allow him to run at all, let alone run at record-breaking speeds.
“The short answer is that it’s not fair to the able-bodied athletes who don’t want to get into the enhancement game.
Moving forward, it sets up a situation where:
- able-bodied athletes will increasingly be set at a disadvantage relative to the cyber-athletes, particularly as prostheses improve, and
- able-bodied athletes will have no choice but to seek enhancement measures of their own, legal or otherwise, to remain competitive.”
Read the whole piece before making your mind up; it won’t take you long.
I’m not sure where I stand on this issue, because our species-wide fascination with competitive sports has always baffled me completely; I guess I don’t care who runs in a race, enhanced or otherwise. As long as it isn’t me. 😉
But bearing in mind how financially lucrative the sports industry is, I can see Dvorsky having a point. After all, it’s not as if his second point doesn’t describe a situation that already exists in the present with regards to drugs and dietary supplements, without any pressure from cyborg athletes in the same leagues.
Via 
Over at io9, Charlie Jane Anders digs for the root cause of an accepted truism of genre (and, I think, all) writing: