First amputee sprinter; came in second in semi-final.
South Africa’s Oscar Pistorius made history by becoming the first amputee sprinter to compete at
the Olympics.The four-time Paralympic champion, 25, whose legs were amputated below the knee as a baby, finished second in his 400m heat in a time of 45.44 seconds to reach Sunday’s semi-final.
“I didn’t know if I should cry or be happy. It was such a mix of emotions,” Pistorius told BBC Sport.
I have seen able-bodied people jumping and running wearing prosthetics that are very similar to those worn by Pistorius (see here for a picture of one from a horse-and-acrobat show), and like some others, I wonder whether they even give the wearers an unfair advantage over normal humans; certainly, the acrobats in the Cavalia’s Odysseo horse and acrobat show that I saw, wearing similar prosthetics, could do very high leaps and flips, and run fairly fast, on them, much more than a person can normally do… Okay, I admit it: I don’t wonder; I do indeed believe they constitute an unfair advantage…
Just another example of everything that’s wrong with the Olympics today, IMO…
