Oscar Pistorius will appeal yesterday’s track and field ruling that shut the South African amputee athlete out of the Olympic Games.

“I feel that it is my responsibility, on behalf of other disabled athletes, to stand firm,” Pistorius said yesterday after the International Association of Athletics Federations said the carbon-fibre prosthetics attached to Pretorius’s stumps give him an unfair advantage over two-legged runners.

The ruling goes beyond Olympic exclusion and bans Pistorius from any races against able-bodied athletes.

While an IAAF spokesman said the ruling applied specifically to the carbon-fibre blades used by Pistorius - Cheetahs manufactured by the Icelandic company Ossur - the athlete said he needs to fight the ban on behalf of all athletes with disabilities.
“I will appeal [against] this decision at the highest levels, while also continuing with my quest to race in the Paralympic Games and hopefully the Olympic Games,” Pistorius said.

Pistorius’s manager Peet van Zyl says not enough study was done before the IAAF declared that Cheetahs give a runner an unfair mechanical edge.

“We are obviously very disappointed,” van Zyl said. “We need to talk with them and our legal advisers’ about how we progress, what we need to do to appeal in terms of the IAAF regulations.”

Pistorius, a 21-year-old business management student at the University of Pretoria, has already taken part in sanctioned races with two-legged runners, such as last July’s Golden League meeting in Rome, and his own country’s national championships in which he finished second in the 400 metres.

His best 400-metre time is 46.56 seconds and he was closing in on the qualifying standard for the 2008 Olympics, 45.95 seconds. He petitioned the IAAF to allow him into the Beijing field if he can reach the mark by the July deadline. He said his dream was to compete at this summer’s Beijing Olympics, possibly as part of the South African 4×400 relay team.

The critical study, carried out by biomechanics expert Gert-Peter Brueggemann at the German Sport University in Cologne, compared Pistorius with five able-bodied athletes of similar ability. He concluded that Pistorius needed 25-per-cent less energy to run at the same speed as the able-bodied sprinters because of his springy J-shaped prosthetics.

The technical analysis of the runners’ motions indicated running with prosthetic blades leads to less vertical motion combined with less mechanical work for lifting the body. As well as this, the energy loss in the blade is significantly lower than in the human ankle joints in sprinting at maximum speed. Last year, the IAAF amended its rules to ban the use of any technical device incorporating springs, wheels “or any other element that provides the user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device.”

Source: Globe and Mail