Paralympics 2.0

Oscar Pistorius was right all along, at least for now. He was right to appeal the ruling from the International Association of Athletics Federations that forbade him from competing alongside Olympians in Beijing for one simple reason: he is an Olympian.

(read the complete article at Bioethics Forum)

(conclusion:)

...exposing the injustice of segregation should be our primary moral concern and its significance far exceeds that of ensuring fairness to able-bodied athletes. The question we should be asking is not whether Paralympians should compete at the Olympics, but why they are separate in the first place…

...Some years in the future, this issue will rear its head again when able-bodied athletes become synthetically enhanced to such a degree as to make them, once again, competitive against the hard prosthesis that Pistorius enjoys. We thought the ethics of doping was difficult? It’s all about to get much more complicated. However, there will be one crucial difference between how the world of sport treats this bionic future compared with that of performance-enhancing drugs. I doubt very much that we’ll hear the rhetoric of futuristic “freak shows” and so on when discussing how prosthetic devices change the capacities of people with disabilities. This common, though unreasonable assault on doped athletes has been advanced from various critics of doping practices, including Wildor Hollmann, president of the World Federation of Sports Physicians in 1984 and recently departed World Anti-Doping Agency President Dick Pound (2004).1 I wonder how they will characterize the athletes of this new era of bionic prostheses.
1. J. Hoberman, Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping (University of California Press, 2006), p. 192; R. Pound, “An Olympian Test of Our Morality,” Financial Times (London), August 9, 2004, p. 17.

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Andy Miah is an IEET Fellow, a Reader in New Media & Bioethics at the University of the West of Scotland, UK. He is author of Genetically Modified Athletes (2004) and is currently working on The Medicalisation of Cyberspace and CyberSport: Digital Games, Ethics & Cultures' (The MIT Press, 2007).