On Euston Road in London, about seven miles from where Oscar Pistorius will run in the Olympics atop legs of carbon fiber, is the Wellcome Collection, home to an array of science-based exhibits reflecting the influences of art, history and other aspects of the humanities. One of its current features is titled Superhuman.
The show explores human enhancement of all types, with an eye toward what the future of biological augmentation might bring. It’s artsy, occasionally whimsical and very forward-thinking — and on point with regard to Pistorius’ competing in these Olympics and a sign of how future Games may change.
We’ve heard all about Pistorius, the South African sprinter born without fibulas, who wears prosthetics called Flex-Foot Cheetahs that allow him to compete not just with disabled runners, but with the best able-bodied sprinters on the planet.
His presence at the Games has sparked considerable debate. Do his prosthetics give him an unfair advantage, as some still argue, or do their limitations — not to mention his incomplete lower-body musculature, which forces him to compensate with muscle groupings elsewhere — level the competitive balance? For an example of how divergent opinions are, look no further than the team that helped overturn the 2007 ban laid down on Pistorius by the International Association of Athletic Federations, which had prevented him from competing at the Olympic level.
Pistorius is physiologically the same as other athletes, they argued in a paper published in the Journal of Applied Physiology (.pdf), even if he’s mechanically different. The Court of Arbitration in Sport agreed, and the IAAF relented; in 2008, his ban was overturned, although he did not meet the Olympic qualifying time for Beijing and ran in the Paralympics instead.
It appears that the paper’s authors have traveled divergent paths from that point.
“The lightness of Pistorius’ limbs make him 15 to 20 percent, or more, faster than he would otherwise be,” the paper’s lead author, Peter Weyand, an associate professor of applied physiology and biomechanics at Southern Methodist University, told Wired. “He can reposition his limbs 20 to 25 percent faster than intact-limb runners who have the same top speed ... and 16 percent faster than five world record-holders in the 100 meters.” Weyand says that Pistorius’ blades can augment his 400 time by as much as eight seconds. (Read an expanded form of his argument here.)
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“Peter’s claim that Oscar Pistorius can swing his legs back and forth faster than any other athlete is decidedly false,” a third of the paper’s authors, Hugh Herr, director of the Biomechatronics Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory, told Wired. “If an Oscar Pistorius wants to participate [in the Olympics], he should be allowed. We should have the technology that would allow a fairness of sport, that would allow him freedom.”
Herr is right. We should have technology that allows Paralympians the freedom to compete on an Olympic-caliber playing field — but currently we either don’t, or can’t agree on the fact that we do.
(It should be noted that for devices like the Cheetahs to make a difference of Olympic proportions, they have to be worn by double-amputees. People who have lost only one leg face significant challenges getting their biological and prosthetic limbs to sync with elite-athlete perfection with regard to things like the distribution of weight and energy.)
Suffice it to say that there are no easy answers. But forget Pistorius for a moment: No matter how he does in the 400-meter preliminaries Saturday, his is today’s problem, featuring today’s technology — and in some cases, yesterday’s. The Cheetahs he uses are very similar to the Cheetahs introduced in 1997; the science behind them seems to have plateaued, but that almost certainly won’t be the case much longer.
Today’s prosthetics are attempting to emulate the human body, particularly joint functionality. Scientists are exploring regulated power (synching a knee’s motion to that of an ankle, for example) and see a future with osseointigration, in which a limb is connected directly to the body, rather than strapped onto a stump, and neural control.
Herr’s company, iWalk, currently offers a lower-leg system with a bionic ankle that can sense movement and adjust to terrain. It contains robotics that imitate muscles and tendons. The salient point here is that such a device, like those imagined in the preceding paragraph, are designed not to confer athletic advantage, but to put their users, if you’ll pardon the phrase, on equal footing with the rest of us.
But what happens when the technological curve climbs even further? How will coming generations of prosthetics affect what Paralympians can achieve beyond even their able-bodied counterparts? If human growth hormone can tilt a playing field, what might bionics wreak?
This is not so far-fetched as it might sound. Already Esco Bionics and Argo Medical Industries are developing powered exoskeletons designed to help the wheelchair-bound become ambulatory. From there, it isn’t difficult to envision technology that is augmentary, not assistive, an array of bigger-stronger-faster gadgetry that affords people abilities far beyond those provided by human physiology. We can already glimpse such a future in devices like Raytheon’s XOS 2 exoskeleton, designed to increase a soldier’s strength.
When such devices are perfected to the point that they can be used for athletic purposes, we’ll be looking at an entirely new concept of sport. It’s doubtful the Olympics will ever feature exoskelletally assisted runners or weightlifters, but what’s to say that a different type of venue won’t arise for such a thing?
“I think that once the technology is proven to exceed normal human function, then the stage will be set for the introduction of a whole new type of enhanced sporting entertainment,” said Matthew Garibaldi, director of the Orthotic and Prosthetic Centers for the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at UC San Francisco.
This raises a fundamental question for the next generation: What do we want our sport to be?
“On the one extreme, is it supposed to be biological and pure,” asked Weyand, “or on the other, will we be perfectly okay with it being a gladiator sport and pharmaceutical freakshow?”
In other words, the future of sport — or, at the least, one facet of it— may well involve competing manufacturers helping athletes square off in a sort of Robocop games. “People have always thought the human body is the ideal,” Herr, himself a bilateral amputee, once told ESPN. “It’s not.”
Even in the face of such an outlandish future, however, it’s likely that sanctioning bodies governing the world’s sports — especially those in which artificially assisted athletes compete against the able-bodied — will face many of the same challenges they do today when it comes to the likes of Pistorius: deciding what’s fair, and determining legal from illegal.
There are many questions regarding Pistorius’ prosthetics. Are the advantages that come with their light weight counteracted by the drawbacks of diminished energy return? And forget the energy lost where foot meets track; how much dissipates at the point of contact between stump and prosthetic? How profound is the affect of having to use thigh and trunk muscles to make up for those that are no longer in his legs? Current science is unable to agree on definitive answers, and will undoubtedly face greater concerns, and trickier questions, in the future.
Even when technology gives us a leg that precisely mimics biologic function, confirming the extent of that function for the sake of competition could be just as tricky as figuring out the details of the leg in the first place. Every amputee, after all, interacts with his or her prosthetic in unique ways, making the fine-tuning of an elite athlete’s false limb as important as the limb itself. NASCAR required the use of carburetor restrictor plates on some tracks to keep cars below a certain speed. Could the International Association of Athletic Federations do the same?
All this, of course, is in the future. Today, not far from Olympic Stadium, the Wellcome Collection has amassed an assortment of futuristic ideas that are of interest to the sporting world primarily because they come from people who, by the looks of it, have no professional interest in the sporting world.
Take, for example, Andy Miah, chair in Ethics and Emerging Technologies at the University of the West of Scotland, who on the Wellcome website offers a taped exegisis about the look of future sports. His vision eliminates much of what makes today’s elite athletes elite.
“Fifty years from now, we may not have [the Olympics and Paralympics]—we may have only one set of performances that people compete in, that reveal how capable they are at using their bodies in combination with technology. . . .” he says. “When I tune into the Olympics 50 years from now, I not only expect to see different kinds of sports [than we have today], but you never know—I may even be competing there.”
Computer geek as Olympic hero. We’re looking at a whole new world indeed.
UPDATE 2:20 p.m. Aug. 7: Wired incorrectly reported that professor Peter Weyand of Southern Methodist University indicated that double amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius can stride 20 to 25% faster than intact-limb runners who have the same top speed and 16% faster than five former world record holders in the 100 meter dash. Weyand’s statements to Wired referred to Pistorius’ limb repositioning times, and not his stride rate as was reported. Although Wired quoted Hugh Herr of MIT as saying Weyand’s statement was “decidedly false”, the valid measurements available indicate that Weyand’s statement to Wired was completely accurate. The relevant valid measurements are as follows:
- Oscar Pistorius limb repositioning time = 0.284 seconds
- Intact-limb athletes average limb repositioning time = 0.359 seconds
- Five former world-record holders average limb repositioning time = 0.337 seconds
- The single briefest valid repositioning time measurement for a male sprinter = 0.300 seconds
As documented in the scientific and popular literature, the limb repositioning time of Oscar Pistorius is off the biological charts as Weyand has indicated.
