RUN, BABY, RUN

South African paralympian Oscar Pistorius said Saturday that he cried after hearing he had won a landmark appeal to compete against able-bodies athletes for a place in the Beijing Olympics.

"I was just blown away when I found out," he told South Africa's Star newspaper.

"When they told me, I cried. It is a battle that has been going on for far too long. It's a great day for sport.


"I think this day is going to go down in history for the equality of disabled people," he continued.

The 21-year-old, who runs on specially-adapted carbon fibre blades after having his legs amputated below the knee when he was 11 months old, saw a ban imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on Friday.


The 400m runner had been barred from all competitions involving able-bodied athletes because of claims that the artificial legs he uses give him an unfair advantage.

He has vowed to pursue his dream to qualify for the Olympic Games.

Many commenters have expressed disbelief in the wake of Friday’s decision to overturn the International Association of Athletics Federations’ ban against the double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius. What some of them seem to have missed was the reasoning behind the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s unanimous decision: that the scientific analysis suggesting Pistorius gained an advantage from his prostheses was fundamentally flawed. The centerpiece of the I.A.A.F.’s case against Pistorius was the analysis of his prosthetics commissioned last November. The I.A.A.F. spent more than $50,000 to sponsor two days of tests under the supervision of Dr. Peter Brüggemann at the German Sport University in Cologne, Germany.


Brüggemann’s conclusion was that the Cheetahs Pistorius uses as prostheses were more efficient than a human ankle. He also found that they could return energy in maximum speed sprinting and that Pistorius was able to keep up with a few able-bodied sprinters while expending about 25 percent less energy. Based on Brüggemann’s report, the I.A.A.F. decided that Pistorius would not be allowed to compete.


But, according to the opinion of the Court of Arbitration for Sport, that’s when “the process began to go ‘off the rails.’ ” The panel believed that the study was deeply flawed: “The correspondence between the I.A.A.F. and Prof. Brüggemann shows that his instructions were to carry out the testing only when Mr. Pistorius was running in a straight line after the acceleration phase. By the time that the I.A.A.F. commissioned the Cologne tests it was known that this was the part of the race in which Mr. Pistorius ran at his fastest.” The court deemed that this was enough to distort any perception of Pistorius’s possible advantages relative to able-bodied runners.


Still, the court recognized that Pistorius defied running orthodoxy by running faster splits in the second and third 100 meters of a 400-meter race, whereas able-bodied runners traditionally run a quicker first and second 100 meters.

But most important, the court emphasized that the ruling is extremely narrowly tailored and that future decisions on the matter will be made on a case-by-case basis:

“The panel’s decision has absolutely no application to any other athlete, or other type of prosthetic limb. Each case must be considered by the I.A.A.F. on its own merits. The ruling does not grant a blanket license to other single or double amputees to compete in I.A.A.F.-sanctioned events using Cheetah Flex-Foot Prosthetics or indeed any other type of prosthesis.”


And the ruling hardly gives Pistorius carte blanche. The panel did not rule out the chance that, “with future advances in scientific knowledge, and a testing regime designed and carried out to the satisfaction of both parties, the I.A.A.F. might in the future be in a position to prove that the existing Cheetah Flex-Foot model provides Mr. Pistorius with an overall net advantage over other athletes.”

The court, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, is an independent institution which, according to its web site, has almost 300 arbitrators from 87 countries.