Should this guy able to compete against normal people?

But that seems like a weird rule to me. Suppose we could demonstrate that his artificial legs quintupled his speed relative to the average Olympic runner. Okay that would clearly be an advantage, so that would be bad...so how would he react? If he were rational, he'd buy less effective prosthetics, but unless he is abnormally scrupulous he would not want to buy ones that made him just as fast as the average Olympic runner (in which case he'd lose the race, as one of the competitors is bound to be above average), he'd want ones that put him in the top 10%, or 5%, or 1% (or in the extreme that made him just 1% faster than the fastest reported runner).

There is no such thing as an "unfair" advantage, except subjectively, and even what is an "advantage" has some subjectivity to it in certain circumstances...but athletic competitions tend not to be terribly subjective. Winners and losers are determined by largely objective criteria. Or at least that's the way it used to be.

If we want to allow in mechanical aids so long as they are "fair" then we undermine what I see as essence of the sport--the objective determination of a victor, because any win by the augmented athlete will forever be open to question. We may hide the subjectivity we've just added in a pre-race determination, rather than in the final criteria of who crosses the finish line first, but that doesn't make the guy's wins any less open to valid disagreements.

As for Tiassa's question of who would give up their legs for prosthetics, very few would, at least right now. Give the prosthetics a decade or more to advance, and I think the numbers will start to increase dramatically, especially if you have dedicated your life to a sport, and the prosthetics increasingly start to seem like a de facto necessity to remain in the top tier of all athletes.

I can as easily ask who would want to risk getting cancer to be good at college football? The answer today is that a lot of kids can and do volunteer to take that risk for that purpose. It my have been different before steroid use started to become prevalent, but then you reach a tipping point and those within a given community (like the community of top athletes) do crazy things.

 

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The simple solution would be to standardize the specifications of prosthetic limbs in racing, at least to whatever degree such a thing is possible. That way, even if an augmented runner enjoys some advantage in leg speed or whatever, it could be chalked up as a "natural" advantage on-par with the advantage enjoyed by taller runners like Usain Bolt, who needs to take far fewer steps than anyone else thanks to his length. Rather than complaining about such a built-in advantage and wondering just how much of his success is due to it, we marvel at it and laud him for it. "Cograts for having such a great advantage before the race even begins!"

The same could be true for the future Oscar Pistoriuses of the world. It just takes time.

 

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It was fair enough to him.... An those around him. It don't matter what we think. We can't change a thing.

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I agree , I think they were brow beat into submitting to his wants and forgot about what being fair is all about.

 

So a paraplegic in a motorized wheel chair should be okay as long as we standardixe the motors used? And by "standardize" I presume you mean "limit their top speed so tht it's close to that of a non-augmented human runner at the Olympic level" of something similar. To me, that makes thje whole race incredibly arbitrary. The future Pistoriuses of the world can claim that they only lost because some bureaucrat defined the limitation on their prosthetics "wrong". Any non-augment athlete can claim the same thing in the event an augmented future Pistorius wins.

The more room for arbitrary decision making you include, the more pointless this competition becomes. The oposition would be like allowing "some" steroid use in sports, as long as it's kept to a "fair" level.

The interesting thing to me is that the same debate will inevitably arise in the context of genetically engineering people to be superior athletes, and that will change the boundaries of these sorts of competitions. Are we going to disqualiy some poor soul just because his parents had his genes manipulated? Even though it has made him genuinely fast?

Based on the current thinking with Pistorius, I'm guessing we will allow those augments too...either that or we draw yet another arbitrary line in the rules.

 

It's incredibly disingenuous to pretend that you don't see the difference between prosthetic legs and a motorized wheel chair. What makes his participation "fair" or not are biometric measures such as energy expenditure, fatigue rate, and how his body motion compares to that of other racers. Consider: they measured he had an advantage in straightaways due to his needing less vertical force to move. The standardization of such augmentations would occur in these measures, not speed. So long as a person is expending the same amount of energy, fatiguing at the same rate, and breathing as much, then there's nothing to suggest that they have an advantage on the field. The fact that their prostheses look awesome isn't relevant, which is really all you're basing your judgment on.

They already do. Athletes who require testosterone treatment are not banned from competition in any of the major North American sports. And there's nothing arbitrary about ensuring that a prosthesis does not give the athlete a net advantage. There are ways of measuring exactly how much of an advantage an athlete has (Michael Phelps, for example, produces far less lactic acid that a normal person, meaning his recovery time is much shorter than most people's) and all it would take is setting a threshold for augmentations.

Probably at first, but eventually we'll relent. From the standpoint of the athlete in that case, it's no different than being born with natural talent. Should we strike Bill Russel's stats from the record just because he was so much bigger and stronger than everyone else?

As I've explained, the lines aren't arbitrary. Of course, opening up competition to these athletes does challenge the status quo, and there are concerns that must be addressed. But most of the complaints will be based on misunderstandings--such as yours--and intolerance, and those, frankly, don't matter. They're so much noise and will eventually die out with their proponents.

 

Balerion, have you done any sports?

 

Yes. I played football, basketball, and wrestled in middle and high school. And of course I have played football and basketball recreationally my whole life.

 

Okey than lets start with wrestling. Since that is the sport we share. I did judo in high school. Would you allow a heavyweight fighter to fight you in a competition?

 

I wrestled at 155, so no. A heavyweight would have an unfair advantage over me.

 

That is understandable. What about someone with an artificial arm, would that be fair too?

 

Not to the guy with the artificial arm. Prosthesis technology hasn't reached the point yet where such an augmentation would help in a sport like wrestling.

But if you ask 125-lb National Champion Anthony Robles, he'll tell you he didn't need them.

 

A single rate rare occurance such as A. Robles is plausible.

But say that artificial arm was made by the Military, the DOD to be precise. or perhaps a grandma in an exoskeleton...she is weak and old, and with the new technology she can lift a car....or you in a car.

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how about wrestling him?

or a helpless short young asian woman, a mother of four kids...with an exokeleton ready to lift 200kg's

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want to wrestle her?

 

No, because it would be impossible to wrestle someone wearing body armor or a giant mechanical contraption on their back. But let's suppose such technology can be made discrete--like an implant in the spine, say--then I'd still say no because the whole object of this technology is to make people stronger. In that sense, it's like mechanical steroids. This is nothing like Oscar Pistorius's legs, which really just give him the ability to stand upright and run.

However, let's say they created an artificial arm that was built to be slightly less-strong than his other arm, then yeah. I don't see a reason why not.

 

oh really? nothing at all? So Oscar Pistorius's artificial legs behave the same as the normal legs you and I possess?

 

How many times does it need to be said? How many links do I have to provide? The legs don't give him a net advantage in racing. What excuse do you have to be asking this question five pages into the discussion?

 

Not today but what about the future? To allow this in the sport now only opens the way for many other "devices" to be used in future events. That is the reason I'm against it today even if he isn't "better" he is "different".

 

You mean it's a slippery slope of inclusiveness? Oh noes!

The whole point behind the attempt to exclude him was the fear that his prostheses gave him an advantage. If they don't--and if future tech also doesn't--then there's no reason to be worried. Being different has never been a good reason for excluding anyone from competition, and it certainly isn't going to suddenly become one.

 

To everyone saying it gives him an "unfair advantage"... what about the fact that some of the Chinese competitors are taken away and start specialized training an diets from the age of like, five? Where as in most "civilized" countries they get to grow up "normal" first, and thus miss out on that specialized training? I would say if we are going to complain about artificial legs and whatnot, we may as well go the whole way and ensure everyone is on a totally level playing field - like auto-racing, where engines and such are tightly regulated!

[/forced sarcasm]

 

But the word "if" is very important, when hasn't technology improved over the past 50 years? Can you name something that technology hasn't improved quite allot over the years and how it will continue to keep improving. I'm just pointing out that once you let "devices" into the sports arena you are going to have more problems to deal with as time goes by. By just stopping this now can insure that the future sports athletes won't have to worry about others having any "devices" that will help them in sports. Those people with "devices" will be allowed to compete against others that have the same or similar "devices" being used so they too will be able to participate against others of their same ilk.