What Sorts of Paralympics? A Disabled Swimmer’s Dream, a Mother’s Fight

Its about a swimmer with cerebral palsy and developmental differences. An excerpt

“Mr. Kendall Bailey, an athlete who is a citizen of the USA and eligible to represent the USA in international competition, is inappropriately classified to compete in International Paralympic Committee (IPC) swimming competition. Mr. Bailey is intellectually disabled. The intellectual disability classification for swimming (S14) is not presently recognized by the IPC; nor is an intellectually disabled swimmer eligible to compete under the IPC Swimming Functional Classification System.”

see hereTechnorati Tags: Sports, Ableism, Olympics, Paralympics, Discrimination, Disabled people

ESPN Magazine focus on Athletes and Prosthetics

Cover – Bionic Athletes
Cover Story – Let ‘Em Play
Feature – Anything You Can Do…

Pistorius decision of the Court of Arbitration for Sports: Some reflection

see here for the Court of Arbitration for Sports decision
and here the press release

My two main thoughts after reading the ruling and the press release are

1) The ruling I assume will be interpreted to be a ruling against the scientific data claiming that the cheetah legs lead to an unfair advantage. The ruling leaves the door open that one could exclude a runner with prosthetics from competing in a ‘natural leg’ running event if it can be proven that the ‘artificial’ legs lead to an unfair advantage.
This makes sense . So far the process of investigating theses new ‘artificial’ legs is not developed enough to be called a golden standard so its open for interpretations. Once tests are developed that are accepted as the golden standard and they show an unfair advantage one can see that that runner won’t be allowed to run against the ‘biological leg’ runners.

2) However the ruling seems to give the answer to another question. Are the Olympics about athletes who have a body adhering to the norm of the homo sapient species? In other words is the Olympics about athletes with a ‘normal biological body’? The ruling cements the view that the Olympics are not about biological bodies per se. So one can compete in the Olympics independent of whether certain biological parts are replaced by artificial parts.
If the replacement does not lead to a competitive advantage athletes with artificial body parts can compete against athletes where the body part in question is biological and not artificial.
If the replacement does leads to a competitive advantage one could see the ruling opening the door for the scenario where the athletes with artificial body parts compete against each others in the Olympics
whereby the artificial body parts are treated like a pole used in pole vaulting…
Cheers
Gregor

Another ad with may be the message that we can all be together in sports

Another ad with may be the message that we can all be together in sports

Double-amputee sprinter can pursue Olympic dream: ruling

In a unanimous ruling, the Court of Arbitration for Sport announced Friday that double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius will have a chance to represent South Africa at the Beijing Olympics this summer.
more here

Oscar Pistorius and the Future Nature of Olympic, Paralympic and Other Sports

in SCRIPT-ed – A Journal of Law, Technology & Society
Gregor Wolbring, pp.139-160

Oscar Pistorius is a Paralympic bionic leg runner and record holder in the 100, 200, and 400 meters who wants to compete in the Olympics. This paper provides an analysis of a) his case; b) the impact of his case on the Olympics, the Paralympics and other –lympics and the relationships between the –lympics; c) the impact on other international and national sports; d) the applicability of the UN Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. It situates the evaluation of the Pistorius case within the broader doping discourse and the reality that new and emerging science and technology products increasingly generate internal and external human bodily enhancements that go beyond the species-typical, enabling more and more a culture of increasing demand for, and acceptance of modifications of the human body (structure, function, abilities) beyond its species-typical boundaries and the emergence of new social concepts such as transhumanism and the transhumanisation of ableism.

online open access here