POSTED: September 6th 2011
SpeakingUp
JOHN GOODBODY: Pistorius is publicity for athletics but should there be a rethink?
THE JOHN GOODBODY COLUMN / An authoritative and exclusive series from Sports Features Communications
LONDON: Well, Oscar Pistorius got a medal for which he craved at the World Athletics Championships in Daegu but perhaps not for the event he would have liked and certainly not in the manner that he wanted.
South Africa finished second in the 4x400 metres relay but the ‘Blade Runner’ was curiously omitted from the quartet for the final and only actually received his medal, to which he was entitled because he had run in the preliminary rounds, when a team-mate Willem de Beers handed it to him in Pistorius’s room, thanking him for his contribution.
Pistorius would understandably have liked to have received his silver medal in front of the packed crowd, and I can’t blame him, and he would probably have preferred to have got it in the individual 400 metres race, in which he was eliminated in the semi-final.
Why he was left out of the South African team for the relay final is unclear.
This year he has been the second fastest South African 400 metre runner, posting 45.07 seconds in July, a time that was a second quicker than one of the other members of the team, Shane Victor.
He therefore was expected to run, probably it was felt on the first leg which is held in lanes before the athletes come out of their lanes on the second leg.
The International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) wanted Pistorius to run the opening lap, out of fear that his carbon-fibre prosthetic legs might have caused an injury and were probably a worry to the other competitors, if he had run one of the other three laps.
In the preliminaries, he recorded 46.2 seconds, the slowest of the four South Africans, but this was achieved on the opening 400 metres and it is well established that this is usually the slowest of the four laps because the competitor does not have advantage of taking the baton on the move, as the three other athletes do.
Did the South African management use that time as an excuse to leave out Pistorius, knowing the IAAF has reluctantly accepted his admission to elete international athletics ?
What seems to have been ignored in all the controversy about Pistorius, who in 2008 successfully challenged the IAAF’s decision not to allow him to compete against able-bodied runners by taking his appeal to the Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS), is that the issue has brought some much-needed publicity to the sport.
Athletics needs all the interest it can generate and cannot always rely on Usain Bolt’s supreme sprinting and showmanship. Pistorius is supplying unusual interest-- and in spades.
It is certainly heart-warming for the world to see him compete against his fellow men.
The question whether he actually should be allowed to compete seems to me to depend on whether his artifical ‘Cheetah’ feet simply level the playing-field or whether they give him something extra.
Two scientists, who backed the South African in the case when it was heard by the CAS, have now reportedly said that it does give him an extra advantage.
Opponents of the participation of Pistorious have also cited that unlike other 400 metre runners, he accelerates between between 200 and 300 metres.
Surely, it is time for the case to be scientifically reviewed again, so that Pistorius can either be welcomed in the London Olympics or have to wait for the Paralympics later in August, where he could be a star, just as he was in Beijing ?
After all, no one is yet suggesting that wheel-chair athletes should take part in say the Olympic marathon, where their times are faster than able-bodied competitors because those wheel-chair athletes have an evident advantage.
Next year, we will be applauding them in events in the Paralympics –and quite rightly so.
** JOHN GOODBODY covered the 2008 Olympics for The Sunday Times, his 11th successive Summer Games and is the author of the audio book A History of the Olympics, read by Barry Davies, the BBC commentator. He was Sports News Correspondent of The Times 1986-2007, for whom he received journalistic awards in all three decades on the paper, including Sports Reporter of The Year in 2001.
Keywords · IAAF · Daegu 2011 · John Goodbody · Oscar Pistorius
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