By Eric Adelson
The future of sports sits in a Massachusetts basement, down the hall from a roomful of Legos. The future of sports is happening in a cavernous building in Iceland. The future of sports lies under the bed of a 13-year-old boy with no legs in Florida.
The basement: It's in the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, and it's full of metal gizmos that surround an equation-covered whiteboard. A bilateral amputee professor named Hugh Herr works here. If anyone can predict what sports will look like in 2050, it's Herr, who lost his legs 26 years ago in a climbing accident. Herr wears robotic limbs with motorized ankles and insists he doesn't want his human legs back because soon they'll be archaic. "People have always thought the human body is the ideal," he says. "It's not."
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The truth is that it's much too late to stop the technological bus. The dictionary defines a prosthetic as "a device, either external or implanted, that substitutes for or supplements a missing or defective part of the body." By that measure, prosthetics are already used in sports. A swim cap is a prosthetic; it smooths the "defective" surface of a swimmer's head, making it more hydrodynamic. So is Speedo's new LZR Racer, which makes a swimmer more buoyant. Since the suit was introduced, records have fallen like rocks in a landslide, but the sport's governing body decided it was legal. So why, exactly, is the suit okay but Pistorius' legs are not?
Even more surprising, USA Track & Field has worked with Nike to test carbon-sole shoe implants that harness energy normally lost when a runner's foot pushes off. Americans wore the shoes in the Sydney Olympics, meaning able-bodied sprinters have already used the type of carbon-infused prosthetics that got Pistorius banned. What's the difference between carbon shoes and carbon tibiae? Fashion? "It's a borderline case," says USOC sports technologist Peter Vint. "We're continuing to ask if that's legal or not."
The bottom line is this: Sports do not need knee-jerk segregation, they need rational and fair regulation. Every organized sport begins the same way, with the creation of rules. We then establish technological limits, as with horsepower in auto racing, stick curvature in hockey, bike weight in cycling. As sports progress, those rules are sometimes altered. The USGA, for instance, responded to advances in club technology by legalizing metal heads in the early '80s. In Chariots of Fire, the hero comes under heavy scrutiny for using his era's version of steroids: a coach, at a time when the sport frowned upon outside assistance. So if we can adjust rules of sports to the time, why not for prosthetics? Create a panel of scientists and athletes, able-bodied and disabled, and ask them to determine what's fair. One example: We know the maximum energy return of the human ankle, so that measurement could be the limit for the spring of a prosthetic ankle. That type of consideration is much fairer than simply locking out an entire group of athletes. "Not allowing someone to compete who is using his own power is a big thing to say," says Steve Novick, a U.S. Senate candidate from Oregon who has a prosthetic left hand. "You are denying the right to the pursuit of happiness in a fundamental way."
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