But the growing child didn't let his disability slow him down. At age 12 he was playing rugby with the other boys, and in , at age 18, he ran the meter race in But should he be allowed to compete? The question seems preposterous. How could someone without lower legs possibly have an advantage over athletes with natural legs? The debate took a scientific turn in when a German team reported that Pistorius used 25 percent less energy than natural runners.
The Flex-Foot Cheetah has become the go-to running prosthetic for Paralympic and, potentially Olympic athletes. The Cheetah's carbon-fiber layers then rebound off the ground in response to the runner's strides. Pistorius hired Jeffrey Kessler, a high-powered lawyer who's represented athletes from the National Basketball Association and National Football League.
It soon became clear that the IAAF's study was very poorly designed, so when Pistorius's team asked for a new study they got it.
Soon scientists gathered at Rice University to figure out just what was going on with Pistorius's body. The scientific team included Peter Weyand , a physiologist at Southern Methodist University who had the treadmills needed to measure the forces involved in sprinting. Rodger Kram , at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was a track and field fan who studied biomechanics. Hugh Herr , a double amputee himself, was a renowned biophysicist. The trio, and other experts, measured Pistorius's oxygen consumption, his leg movements, the forces he exerted on the ground and his endurance.
They also looked at leg-repositioning time—the amount of time it takes Pistorius to swing his leg from the back to the front. After several months the team concluded in a paper for The Journal of Applied Physiology that Pistorius was "physiologically similar but mechanically dissimilar" to someone running with intact legs. He uses oxygen the same way natural-legged sprinters do, but he moves his body differently. That summer, Leeper had sprinted the meter in He flew to Boulder for a series of grueling experiments, assessing his physiology and biomechanics while bursting out of the starting blocks, running at maximum speed, handling curves and sprinting to exhaustion.
The research team then compared his performance, physiology and biomechanics to those of more than 30 nonamputee elite runners and submitted the results to the world's top sports court, the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland.
In fact, Grabowski noted, his prostheses render him at a significant disadvantage bursting out of the blocks and rounding curves.
In order to compete in the Tokyo games under the rule, Leeper would have to modify his prostheses to make him approximately 6 inches shorter. At the semifinals the next day, Pistorius finished in last place, with a time of After filing a protest, South Africa was allowed to compete in the finals the next day; the team, anchored by Pistorius, finished in eighth place.
Then, on February 14, , Pistorius was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, year-old Reeva Steenkamp, whom he admitted to fatally shooting at his Pretoria, South Africa, home earlier that day.
Pistorius claimed he mistook Steenkamp, a model and law graduate, for an intruder. He was charged with premeditated murder, to which he pleaded not guilty when his case went to trial in March , amidst intense media coverage.
That September, Pistorius was found guilty of culpable homicide, the equivalent of manslaughter, but cleared of the more serious charge of murder. In October , the year-old former Olympian was sentenced to five years in prison; the sentence was later extended.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! A mass shooting takes place early in the morning in Dayton, Ohio on August 4, Just one day Throughout its existence, the Bracero Program The athletes who complain are the ones who aren't running fast enough. Ade Adepitan, who competed in wheelchair basketball and now presents Channel 4's That Paralympic Show , has more conflicted views, but feels that Pistorius could be a radical role model for disabled athletes. What doors would it open up?
What implications does it have? None of us will know until it happens, but that's the great thing about what Oscar is doing: he's asking questions. What everyone does agree on is that you would be hard pushed to find a nicer guy or better ambassador for his sport.
Pistorius is known for telling children that his legs were bitten off by a big shark, or that they fell off because he didn't eat his greens — depending on whether their parents are around — and he believes it is his responsibility to educate people positively about disability.
He is heavily involved in the Mineseeker Foundation, which supplies prosthetic limbs to the victims of landmines in Mozambique. Pistorius was born in in Johannesburg to Sheila and Henke, who works in dolomite mining. After the amputation, Oscar was given a set of fibreglass legs and within six months he was taking his first faltering steps.
He was a natural sportsman, playing rugby, tennis and water polo to a high level, but life away from games was less happy. His parents split when he was six and, when he was 15, his mother, to whom he was particularly close, died. His progress has never been exactly straightforward though. There remains considerable scientific doubt over whether his crescent-shaped legs give him an unfair advantage; one report, in the Journal of Applied Physiology in , claimed that the Cheetahs might provide him with as much as a second boost over m.
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